Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

“So we thought we’d go outside,” Elena said.

  “Don’t y’all have, like, a yard or something?” This was a kid. A rookie.

  “There are cameras in the yard!” Elena was gesticulating, now, playing into the whole fiery-Latina-woman bullshit. “Seriously, they watch us all the time.”

  “Is that even legal?” the woman asked. “Arizona has a Peeping Tom law, I know ’cause my ex—”

  “Shut up about your ex, already.” There was warmth at Ulicez’s back. “If I let you go, son, are you gonna run?”

  “No, sir. I just want to go home.”

  “All right, then. Shut your barn door and turn around.”

  Ulicez did up his fly and stood up, slowly. They were rent-a-cops. Not border security, not BORSTAR, not a militia, just corporate night-shifters with orange cheese-worm dust on their shirts and dark rings under their eyes. Above them, botflies glowed green and hovered, perfectly still. Ulicez resisted the temptation to address them directly.

  “We’re sorry,” he said.

  “Really sorry,” Elena added.

  “Yeah. We just . . .” He heaved a very heavy sigh. “That place will drive you crazy, you know? Just knowing how much rides on it, on how you look and how you act and everything, and . . .”

  “We haven’t had sex in weeks,” Elena said. “Really.”

  “You married?” the man asked.

  “Yes,” they answered in unison.

  As one, all three rent-a-cops laughed. “Well shit, son, welcome to the new normal,” the man said. “Get your lady her sweater. Y’all want a ride back to town? We’ll help you straighten everything out.”

  Ulicez almost choked, but Elena stepped forward. “That would be so great. Thank you.” She jerked her head at him. “Did I mention this was his idea?”

  The woman rolled her eyes. She flipped her long gray braid to the other side of her head and helped Elena put her shirt back on. “My ex, he was like that,” she said. “One time he wanted to go under the bleachers at the high school. Naturally, after that, I found out he was running around with some freshman at the community college, and I had to end it.”

  “Obviously,” Elena said.

  “Would you shut up about that asshole?” the man said. “Honestly, Joanne, it’s bad enough when you talk our ears off about it—”

  “And it just means you’re really not over it, yet,” the kid said. He jingled some keys. “Can I drive?”

  “No, you cannot drive, I keep telling you, not at night. You let me drive, and you let me do the talking when we get up to . . .” He held up a key fob and in the distance, a massive truck started. “What’s it called, again?”

  “Mariposa,” Ulicez said. “We live in Mariposa.”

  RedKoala/Shutterstock, Inc.

  STORY NOTES—Madeline Ashby

  International borders are a work of fiction. They are a consensual hallucination that we all engage in to perpetuate the status quo. In that regard, they are much like currency in that they have value, but the value itself is a fragile social construct vulnerable to the whims of history.

  Trust me. I’m an immigrant.

  In January 2006, I was denied entry to Canada. I entered the next month, after spending an hour pleading my case with border security. Finally, I immigrated to Canada. Two years later, a friend of mine was arrested at the U.S. border, and then convicted of assaulting a federal officer when he was the one who took the beating. I decided to write a design thesis on the future of border security, and what I imagined was nightmarish: a world of invisible, invasive surveillance, the kind the NSA dreams about.1 This story is an effort to imagine another future.

  I kept some of the surveillance, but not all of it. Instead, I focused on the border space as a kind of third space, wherein social norms and other mores can be temporarily left behind like so much cultural baggage. I was drawn to stories like the 1967 TV series The Prisoner, where a man wakes up in a village full of people whose names have become numbers. And I was thinking of novels like China Miéville’s The City & the City, where the border isn’t so much a line as it is a ritual. I was also forced to reconsider some of the materials I had read during my stint in the Border Town Design Studio, which exhibited at the Detroit Design Festival in 2011. Among these was a paper by Adham Selim called “Emergent Border Cities,”2 which suggested a design intervention in the border space that would act like a cultural moat as well as a border town. The community would enforce the border. The border would become the community. I was fascinated by the idea and ran with it after talking with Darren Petrucci at Arizona State University about things like corporate sponsorship and branded communities. It was then that I lit on the idea of terraforming the desert around Nogales as solar farmland. To me, corporate security acting in the interests of protecting a technology investment would do a better job than a bunch of police academy washouts whose hiring requirements don’t even include a college degree.

  To understand the need to blacken the desert with photovoltaic cells, you have to understand the punitive nature of the Sonora Desert. Thanks to Operation Gatekeeper3 the majority of illegal immigrants have to hike or ride through it to avoid border checkpoints. To borrow a phrase from David Lean, the Sonora is God’s anvil. In the summer, average temperatures hit 120˚F. Every day, No More Deaths picks up the migrants that U.S. Customs and Border Protection dumps back in Mexico and gives them water and food, bandages their blistered feet, and treats their tarantula bites. But in reality, people die in the borderland all the time. Between 1998 and 2009, they numbered over four thousand.4 Most of those men, women, and children died of exposure. I realized the solar energy that was killing them could be fueling both countries instead.

  At the same time, news was coming out of the American Southwest that looked like it belonged in the pages of a Margaret Atwood novel. Texas women were crossing the border to obtain Cytotec, because new laws were (and still are) eliminating abortion clinics and making preprocedural sonograms mandatory.5 It was a bad year for Texas women. It was a bad year for women, period. What was life like for the immigrant women of Texas? I wondered. What would it be like to sacrifice so much for a dream of freedom, only to have that freedom taken away? It was in that spirit that I named this story after the Public Enemy song “By the Time I Get to Arizona,” written about Governor Evan Mecham’s racist policies6 in that state. Arizona’s current stop-and-frisk policies, and its measurement of the “border” as “anywhere 200 miles north of the fence,”7 haven’t evolved much since 1991.

  You might think my research and personal experience would have made the story easier to write. It didn’t. I struggled with it at each step. Writing it uncovered a well of bad memories inside me, and every time I stared at the blank white page I felt I was really looking down a deep dark hole. The same history that compelled me to write about the border also frustrated my attempts to pin it down with words. When I was in the process of immigrating, so much of my anxiety was wordless. It’s only now that I understand how the invasiveness of it damaged my sense of dignity. And I’m one of the lucky ones.

  In the end, I had to decide on an ending that was just as absurd as the border itself. Sometimes absurdity is the only thing that can combat absurdity. So what was a story about how surveillance causes us to perform citizenship as an identity became a story about how, for the people in the audience watching that performance, the ubiquitous surveillance is nothing but an unfortunate nuisance. Tragic when it happens to me, funny when it happens to you. What’s really funny, of course, is that American citizens are surveilled just as closely as the people outside its borders, and the ones trying to get in. The whole country is one big border town, to read the Snowden documents. We are all performing our citizenship. We are all living in the Village.

  Notes

  1. http://madelineashby.com/?p=1068

  2. http://adhamselim.blogspot.ca/2011/05/emergent-border-cities.html

  3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gatekeeper

  4. http://on
line.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323741004578417113103350812

  5. http://austinist.com/2012/08/14/texas_women_are_crossing_the_border.php

  6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_91 . . . _The_Enemy_Strikes_Black

  7. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/us/politics/24immig.html?_r=0

  EMERGENT BORDER CITIES—Adham Selim

  Architect Adham Selim theorizes the emergent border city at hieroglyph.asu.edu/mariposa.

  Work-in-Progress Update: April 2013

  Read a work-in-progress update from Madeline Ashby in April 2013 at hieroglyph.asu.edu/mariposa to see how a conversation with Arizona State University architecture and urban design professor Darren Petrucci influenced her thinking.

  THE MAN WHO SOLD THE MOON

  Cory Doctorow

  HERE’S A THING I didn’t know: there are some cancers that can only be diagnosed after a week’s worth of lab work. I didn’t know that. Then I went to the doctor to ask her about my pesky achy knee that had flared up and didn’t go away like it always had, just getting steadily worse. I’d figured it was something torn in there, or maybe I was getting the arthritis my grandparents had suffered from. But she was one of those doctors who hadn’t gotten the memo from the American health-care system that says that you should only listen to a patient for three minutes, tops, before writing him a referral and/or a prescription and firing him out the door just as the next patient was being fired in. She listened to me, she took my history, she wrote down the names of the anti-inflammatories I’d tried, everything from steroids to a climbing buddy’s heavy-duty prescription NSAIDs, and gave my knee a few cautious prods.

  “You’re insured, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Good thing, too. I read that knee replacement’s going for seventy-five thousand dollars. That’s a little out of my price range.”

  “I don’t think you need a knee replacement, Greg. I just want to send you for some tests.”

  “A scan?”

  “No.” She looked me straight in the eyes. “A biopsy.”

  I’m a forty-year-old, middle-class Angeleno. My social mortality curve was a perfectly formed standard distribution—a few sparse and rare deaths before I was ten, slightly more through my teens, and then more in my twenties. By the time I was thirty-five, I had an actual funeral suit I kept in a dry-cleaning bag in the closet. It hadn’t started as a funeral suit, but once I’d worn it to three funerals in a row, I couldn’t wear it anywhere else without feeling an unnamable and free-floating sorrow. I was forty. My curve was ramping up, and now every big gathering of friends had at least one knot of somber people standing together and remembering someone who went too early. Someone in my little circle of forty-year-olds was bound to get a letter from the big C. There wasn’t any reason for it to be me. But there wasn’t any reason for it not to be either.

  Bone cancer can take a week to diagnose. A week! During that week, I spent a lot of time trying to visualize the slow-moving medical processes: acid dissolving the trace of bone, the slow catalysis of some obscure reagent, some process by which a stain darkened to yellow and then orange and then, days later, to red. Or not. That was the thing. Maybe it wasn’t cancer. That’s why I was getting the test, instead of treatment. Because no one knew. Not until those stubborn molecules in some lab did their thing, not until some medical robot removed a test tube from a stainless steel rack and drew out its contents and took their picture or identified their chemical composition and alerted some lab tech that Dr. Robot had reached his conclusion and would the stupid human please sanity-check the results and call the other stupid human and tell him whether he’s won the cancer lottery (grand prize: cancer)?

  That was a long week. The word cancer was like the tick of a metronome. Eyes open. Cancer. Need a pee. Cancer. Turn on the coffee machine. Cancer. Grind the beans. Cancer. Cancer. Cancer.

  On day seven, I got out of the house and went to Minus, which is our local hackerspace. Technically, its name is “Untitled-1,” because no one could think of a better name ten years ago, when it had been located in a dirt-cheap former car-parts warehouse in Echo Park. When Echo Park gentrified, Untitled-1 moved downtown, to a former furniture store near Skid Row, which promptly began its own gentrification swing. Now we were in the top two floors of what had once been a downscale dentist’s office on Ventura near Tarzana. The dentist had reinforced the floors for the big chairs and brought in 60 amp service for the X-ray machines, which made it perfect for our machine shop and the pew-pew room full of lasers. We even kept the fume hoods.

  I have a personal tub at Minus, filled with half-finished projects: various parts for a 3D-printed chess-playing automata; a cup and saucer I was painstakingly covering with electroconductive paint and components; a stripped-down location sensor I’d been playing with for the Minus’s space program.

  Minus’s space program was your standard hackerspace extraterrestrial project: sending balloons into the upper stratosphere, photographing the earth’s curvature, making air-quality and climate observations; sometimes lofting an ironic action figure in 3D-printed astronaut drag. Hacker Dojo, north of San Jose, had come up with a little powered guidance system, but they’d been whipped by navigation. Adding a stock GPS with its associated batteries made the thing too heavy, so they’d tried to fake it with dead-reckoning and it had been largely unsuccessful. I’d thought I might be able to make everything a lot lighter, including the battery, by borrowing some techniques I’d seen on a performance bike-racing site.

  I put the GPS on a workbench with my computer and opened up my file of notes and stared at them with glazed eyes. Cancer. Cancer. Cancer.

  Forget it. I put it all away again and headed up to the roof to clear my head and to get some company. The roof at Minus was not like most roofs. Rather than being an empty gravel expanse dotted with exhaust fans, our roof was one of the busiest parts of the space. Depending on the day and time, you could find any or all of the above on Minus’s roof: stargazing, smoking, BASE jumping, solar experiments, drone dogfighting, automated graffiti robots, sensor-driven high-intensity gardening, pigeon-breeding, sneaky sex, parkour, psychedelic wandering, Wi-Fi sniffing, mobile-phone tampering, HAM radio broadcasts, and, of course, people who were stuck and frustrated and needed a break from their workbenches.

  I threaded my way through the experiments and discussions and build-projects, slipped past the pigeon coops, and fetched up watching a guy who was trying, unsuccessfully, to learn how to do a run up a wall and do a complete flip. He was being taught by a young woman, sixteen or seventeen, evidently his daughter (“Daaad!”), and her patience was wearing thin as he collapsed to the gym mats they’d spread out. I stared spacily at them until they both stopped arguing with each other and glared at me, a guy in his forties and a kind of miniature, female version of him, both sweaty in their sweats. “Do you mind?” she asked.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled, and moved off. I didn’t add, I don’t mean to be rude, just worried about cancer.

  I got three steps away when my phone buzzed. I nearly fumbled it when I yanked it out of my tight jeans pocket, hands shaking. I answered it and clapped it to my ear.

  “Mr. Harrison?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please hold for Doctor Ficsor.” A click.

  A click. “Greg?”

  “That’s me,” I said. I’d signed the waiver that let us skip the pointless date-of-birth/mother’s maiden name “security” protocol.

  “Is this a good time to talk?”

  “Yes,” I said. One syllable, clipped and tight in my ears. I may have shouted it.

  “Well, I’d like you to come in for some confirming tests, but we’ve done two analyses and they are both negative for elevated alkaline phosphatase and lactate dehydrogenase.”

  I’d obsessively read a hundred web pages describing the blood tests. I knew what this meant. But I had to be sure. “It’s not cancer, right?”

  “These are negative indicators for cancer,” the doctor said. />
  The tension that whoofed out of me like a gutpunch left behind a kind of howling vacuum of relief, but not joy. The joy might come later. At the moment, it was more like the head-bees feeling of three more cups of espresso than was sensible. “Doctor,” I said, “can I try a hypothetical with you?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Let’s say you were worried that you, personally, had bone cancer. If you got the same lab results as me, would you consider yourself to be at risk for bone cancer?”

  “You’re very good at that,” she said. I liked her, but she had the speech habits of someone who went to a liability insurance seminar twice a year. “Okay, in that hypothetical, I’d say that I would consider myself to be provisionally not at risk of bone cancer, though I would want to confirm it with another round of tests, just to be very, very sure.”

  “I see,” I said. “I’m away from my computer right now. Can I call your secretary later to set that up?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Greg?”

  “Yes.”

  “Congratulations,” she said. “Sleep easy, okay?”

  “I will try,” I said. “I could use it.”

  “I figured,” she said. “I like giving people good news.”

  I thought her insurance adjuster would not approve of that wording, but I was glad she’d said it. I squeezed the phone back into my pocket and looked at the blue, blue sky, cloudless save for the scummy film of L.A. haze that hovered around the horizon. It was the same sky I’d been standing under five minutes ago. It was the same roof. The same building. The same assemblage of attention-snagging interesting weirdos doing what they did. But I was not the same.

  I was seized by a sudden, perverse urge to go and take some risks: speed down the highway, BASE jump from Minus’s roof, try out some really inadvisable parkour moves. Some part of me that sought out patterns in the nonsense of daily randomness was sure that I was on a lucky streak and wanted me to push it. I told that part to shut up and pushed it down best as I could. But I was filled with an inescapable buoyancy, like I might float right off the roof. I knew that if I’d had a hard time concentrating before, I was in for an even harder time getting down to business now. It was a small price to pay.