Hieroglyph (19 page)

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 Gatekeeper
³
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 policies
⁶
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://online.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?”