The Load

They did not wake us for training.

I had not had a morning like that in a year and my body did not know what to do with it. Everybody was up. Nobody was moving us anywhere. There were bags being carried past the door by men who were not the usual men, and there was the particular hum a building makes when something is ending.

And there was nothing coming through the wall from any of them, because I had been three days without, by then, and a person coming off that is not a person who is reading a room.

It was not the sickness. The sickness was nothing, I had been ill for ten months. It was that the world came back on, all at once, at full volume, in a body that had got used to the quiet, and I had no wall left because I had not needed one for months and you lose the muscle.

They walked us out at dusk.

There was a truck. It was white and it had a company name on the side and I never learned whether the company existed. The back was open and the inside of it was metal and there was nothing in there, no seats, no light, nothing, and it smelled of the last people who had been in it.

I counted fourteen going in and I was right, because I could feel all of them.

And then they put my brother in the truck.

Give me a moment here.

I had not seen Chepe in twelve months. I had asked once and been told to do what I was told and I never asked again out loud, and I had bought the possibility of seeing him every single day for a year, and I had never once been shown him, and I had no proof of anything.

He walked up the ramp on his own legs.

He was thinner and he was taller, which I had not thought about, because he was fifteen when they took us and boys do that even in a year like the one he had, and I remember thinking that in the middle of everything, that he had grown and nobody had been there for it.

He was alive. They had not been lying.

I got about a page of it.

I felt him.

Not the way I feel everybody, which arrives whether I want it or not. I went looking. I had spent a year in a building full of noise with one silence in the middle of it and now the silence had a person in it and I went in after him, and there he was, exhausted and frightened and fifteen and entirely himself.

He said my name.

It was the first time in a year that anybody had used it who meant me.

And then they closed the doors.

I have thought a great deal about the arithmetic. After this I am stopping for the night, because the next several of these are difficult and I would like to arrive at them rested.

The bargain was real. That is the thing. They did keep their end. It cost everything I had and it took a year and there was never a single moment where I could have checked, and at the end of it they brought him out and put him in the same vehicle as me.

So I did not waste it. Every yes I said bought this.

Except that I have never managed to prove that either.

Because he was always going north. He was always going to be in that truck, because he was cargo the same as I was cargo, and the route was the route. Nothing I did in that building may have moved him one inch. It is entirely possible that I paid for a year, deliberately, every day, for a thing that was going to happen anyway.

I cannot get underneath it. There is no answer at the bottom, I have been down there.

So I have two versions. In one of them I bought my brother a year of being alive and the two of us got into a truck together at the end of it. In the other I was extremely good at something for nothing, and he was somewhere else the whole time, being kept, for reasons that had nothing to do with me.

Both of them end in the same truck.

It was dark in there and it got hot fast and somebody was already crying, and I had my brother’s head against my shoulder for the first time since Morazán, and I remember being happy.

In the middle of all of it. In the back of a sealed metal box, with a year on my back and three letters in my wrist and fourteen people’s fear arriving in me at a volume I had lost the ability to filter.

I was happy. It was the last time.