A Haunting in Future Perfect Tense

Marianna Ariel ColesCurtis

these threads capture the shadows

and force them to account for the silence

these threads bind your sight to the sob

—Alejandra Pizarnik

1

Creo que sueñas con una persona cuando la piensas demasiado, Wagner says. Todo el tiempo, todo el tiempo, todo el tiempo.1 It took over a year after Roni’s disappearance in the Sonoran Desert for Wagner to dream of his brother, but once they started, the dreams didn’t stop.

Wagner is Roni’s older brother, and after he left Chiapas for the states, Roni decided to come too. He called Wagner from the tiny border town of Sasabe, Sonora, just before he began the trek across the Sonoran Desert into the US. He knew the guide would take him on a route called El Cerro Elefante, Elephant Peak, after a landmark that won’t be found on any map. Years before, Wagner had made the same journey, so he offered Roni advice. He says Roni was happy. Ponte muy abusado2, Wagner told him. Esto no es un juego3. Wagner never heard from his brother again.

Except in dreams. Inside the purgatorial nature of ambiguous loss, the disappeared are suspended for their family members in a space between life and death. Dreams offer both a mirror of the terrible uncertainty families find themselves in and an escape from it. Dreams are the only space where the missing loved ones can be experienced anew, where they can be present tense. And unlike dreams of the officially dead, dreams of the missing can be interpreted as messages from some corner of the world where the missing loved one is caught and alive.

Ojalá que este sueño me durara, Wagner says. Quisiera tener un sueño largo de dos, tres horas. Ponerme hablar con él y preguntarle todo.4

I listened to Wagner’s story in a podcast produced by the Colibrí Center for Human Rights as part of their Historias y Recuerdos project5, which records oral histories from families whose loved ones have disappeared in the Sonoran Desert. The Colibrí Center facilitates networks for families of the disappeared and works with the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner to match DNA samples they’ve taken from families with DNA taken from remains recovered in the desert.

For the Colibrí Center, success occurs when a match is made between a family and a set of remains. Colibrí’s work is to solidify death, to bind the missing to an end. The match rescues the dreamer from the dream’s uncertain origin.

 

2

A year after I first moved to Arizona in 2008, I worked for a conservation corps whose range covered the entire state. Our first job took place in the Coronado National Forest on the US-Mexico Border. Near the military town of Sierra Vista, a huge, white Border Patrol blimp hulked above us while we worked. We were tasked with finding mountainous piles of backpacks, shoes, clothing, water bottles, and discarded tuna cans in places where guides would have groups of migrants stop and ditch their belongings. We would locate one of these piles, then stuff everything into neon green, ultra-thick trash bags to be evacuated by helicopters later and taken to a dump somewhere. They told us to shake out any shoes we found in case there were bones stuck inside. They didn’t say much else. It was the first time I began to understand the Arizona borderlands as a vast and indeterminate graveyard.

At the time of this writing, the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (PCOME) database contains the DNA of over 1,300 remains found in the desert. For six months after being found, the remains, often skeletonized by harsh desert conditions, are stored in refrigerated containers at PCOME. The holding capacity is always at a tipping point, and they have applied for funding to create a separate storage facility. If remains aren’t identified after 6 months, they are cremated, and each set of cremated remains is placed in a small, brown box. The small, brown boxes sit in a room on top of other small, brown boxes, stacked five feet high against all of the walls. Not all of the remains in boxes are unidentified, but since the repatriation process is very costly, and home countries often do not have or do not provide the funds, families might wait years to scrape together enough money to bring what is left of their loved ones home. And so the boxes of the cremated remains of people who have died crossing the desert, known and unknown, pile up in a room in a building near the air force base in the south of Tucson.

Beyond the city which contains this room, there are massive stretches of land empty and near empty of human life. Because large trees only grow on high elevation mountains, most of the desert is laid bare. It is often the land itself, its rolling and jagged rises and folds, which blocks lines of sight. In places closest to the border there is always the possibility that a dry riverbed or hillside might hold a femur, a jawbone, a desiccated corpse.

In the desert, people can disappear without a trace. Their remains may never be found. A set of recovered remains serves as a trace of a disappearance, but the identity of those remains may never be discovered. A set of recovered remains may never be matched with a family, and families may never find what remains of their missing loved ones.

A haunting permeates the Sonoran Desert, simultaneously in past, present, and future tense. The people who died. The deaths which are occurring. The deaths which will occur. And an even stranger grammar: future perfect. All of the deaths yet to be discovered. The deaths which, if their remains are found or matched with loved ones, will have been.

 

3

As they often do, the inscrutable logics of the border changed direction at the end of 2023. Suddenly there were hundreds of migrants camped out on the US side of the border wall, about 70 miles southwest of Tucson. Everyone was waiting for the chance to ask for asylum, and Border Patrol, which usually chases people down for crossing illegally, took their time coming around. The families, many with toddlers in tow, were left for days in the desert while Border Patrol refused to pick them up. Local aid groups set up a makeshift camp, and I drove down with friends to pass out supplies for a day.

The Trump wall is very high, and the dirt road which runs alongside it extremely steep. There are breaks in the wall where the construction is incomplete, and there are many holes which people have cut in order to cross. Three men in black balaclavas ran back to the Mexican side with an axe when we drove by. They were using the axe to make a new hole in a patch Border Patrol had made over an old hole. We waved to them, and they waved back. As we traveled, the sun shone through the slats of the wall in staccato flashes which made me dizzy.

It has been said that the Anthropocene is some sort of time travel, Bayo Akomolafe writes, in an essay6 on ancestry and apocalypse. It is almost as if we are looking back at ourselves from the devastation of a toxic, posthuman world, trying to understand our age. I closed my eyes while my friend drove, thrust myself into the future, and imagined the Sonoran Desert as an archeological site of the Anthropocene. Instead of confronting the climate crisis, the world’s second largest greenhouse gas emitter turned the ecosystem at its southern border into a militarized graveyard, evidence of which could be found in the belongings of those forced to take the dangerous journey and the bones of those who didn’t make it. The wall still stood, in its patchwork illogic, a strange spine cutting the land, rusted out. Abandoned surveillance towers leaned askew like slowly falling skeletons. Piles of tires, once dragged to clear roads for footprints, rotted in the hot desert sun. A human of the future, I stood among the rubble of my ancestors, shivering at the traces they left behind.

One day, we will all have died, and we will all have lived in what Dionne Brand calls a vicious period7. Tucson, like all border towns, and the towns which bordered them, and the towns which bordered them, will have existed on the edge of a terrible brutality. As residents of the United States, we will have lived in an age, in an empire, which placed very little value on human life, very little value on life at all.

If families of the missing will have been suspended by this brutality in an ambiguous and oneiric present tense, the towns which bordered the brutality will have been suspended outside of a reckoning which should have been taking place as the crisis unfolded. Much of the general public will have had an amnesiac, dissociated, subterranean relationship to the crisis at the southern border. More, we will have lived in a world in which the general consensus of the Global North will have been that it would not receive the citizens of the Global South as they fled the worsening conditions produced by the insatiable economies of the North.

Whether this will have continued as the prevailing consensus remains yet to be seen, but anyone standing close to the border will have been warped by its logic, and we are all standing close to the border.

 

4

On a hot summer evening in Tucson I went to an event in the backyard of a border education organization. The crowd contained young people recently involved in immigration organizing and elders who have been working on these issues for the majority of their lives. We sat in rows of plastic chairs listening to local thinkers and community organizers share their reflections. It was hot, even for June in Tucson. The backs of our knees sweated, and a hole in the ground erupted with black ants.

It was shocking, someone acknowledged, how far the immigration movement had fallen since the early years of the Obama administration. No party stands with immigrants. Still, many of the people who spoke felt that a different paradigm was possible, and that if we could articulate and work for a logic of open borders8 and unbuilt walls9, then we could see it through.

The meeting had opened with a moment of silence. We were given space to think of the people indigenous to the land, to think of the people of Palestine, and of the people who have died trying to cross the desert. We were instructed to close our eyes, and we were called into presence. As sometimes happens inside a collective silence, the space seemed to expand beyond our edges. Time and space folded briefly so that disparate injustice and resistance could touch. We closed our eyes under the same sky whose darkness holds webs of families dreaming of their absent loved ones. We breathed the vapors of these dreams. I thought of Wagner’s voice reaching towards his dreams of Roni. Me da más fuerza, he says, Me da fé sobre todo porque lo veo en el sueño, lo veo bien.10

---