The Sonoran Corridor

The desert was the most honest thing that happened to me on the whole road, and I’ve loved it a little ever since, the way you love a thing that tried to kill you fair.

We walked at night. That much I’ll give you in order, because it happened to my own legs and my head kept it clean. Out of a vehicle somewhere south of the line, then on foot, a line of us strung out behind a man who knew the way, through country that didn’t care about any of it. That was the gift of the desert. It didn’t care. After months of men who looked at me and priced me and processed me and trained me, here at last was a thing that had no opinion of me at all, that would’ve killed a saint and a clerk with the exact same patience, and there was something clean in that, something I could breathe in even while it tried to take my breath.

It was cold at night, colder than anybody tells you, the heat of the day gone straight up into a sky so full of stars it looked wrong, looked like too much. My body did everything at once. The cold raised every hair on me. Sweat dried to salt on my back and then I was colder for it. My feet went from pain to numb to a worse pain. My mouth dried past thirst into something with no name, and the water in the jug went down faster than the distance did, the way the man in the doorway’s worry had promised. My heart slammed. My legs burned and kept going. The whole loud machinery of being alive ran flat out, all of it, redlined, faithful, and for the first time in a long time I was glad of it, glad of the body, because out here the body wasn’t occupied territory or a trained thing that answered to Carlos. Out here it was an engine, and it was mine, and it was strong, and it didn’t quit.

That’s the thing the desert gave me that the safe house never could. It reminded me that under the trained girl and the cold line and the wall over the void, there was an animal that wanted, bad, with everything in it, to live. Not to be free, freedom was off the table, I’d done that math. Just to live. To not lie down in the sand and become a correction in somebody’s book. The wanting was so simple and so strong it almost made me cry, walking, the plain animal want of a body that had been used for everything except its own survival and now, finally, got to spend itself on that, on the plain work of taking the next step and the next.

The man leading us was the last of the machine’s hands. I want that noted. He wasn’t a rescuer, none of them ever were, he was moving cargo across the worst stretch of the route because that was the job, and some of the cargo doesn’t make it and that’s built into the price. But out there even he was just another animal trying to cross, and I watched him the way I watched everything now, cold, complete, missing nothing, learning the country off his back, and I understood I was learning things I’d use. Where the water goes. How the cold comes. How to read ground in the dark. How a body moves when it’s decided not to die. I didn’t know what I’d use them for. The cold part of me filed them anyway, the way it filed everything, against a someday it still couldn’t picture.

I didn’t break in the desert. That’s the whole of this Note. The road had broken me every way a girl can be broken, in rooms and at tables and with words and with a needle on my wrist. The desert tried to break me in the open, fair, with cold and distance and thirst, and it couldn’t, because the animal under all the damage wanted to live more than the desert wanted me dead. I came through the corridor cold and ready and still walking, the stars too bright overhead and the salt on my mouth and my own heart hammering its honest report, alive, alive, alive.

I didn’t know I was walking toward the end of that. Didn’t know the next hands waiting at the end of the crossing wouldn’t be the machine’s at all, would be something the machine had never heard of, and that they’d take the one thing the desert had just handed back to me. My life. My loud, faithful, animal life. I had a few hours of it left. I spent them walking, and wanting to live, and not knowing those were the last hours I’d ever want anything as simply as that again.