The simulation can now recreate you crosser, hundreds of times over. Different versions of yourself that you sometimes see walking around the bridge to portals entrance, (crossers are always suspicious of portals on the border except in Portal, Arizona where they are used to moving through their namesake) different drooped versions of you. They gave you and other crossers this pamphlet you’re now reading, for navigating simulation, but it would’ve taken months to finish reading it and translating it into Spanish. These crossers only have a few hours to live and speak before they expire, saying to customs tl;dr.
The crossers are full of references but they come to simulation with no references. No one to vouch for them except the threat of death for having their hair too short or too long. You look like a cop or a gang they don’t know. Or you got a tattoo of buscando nemo forever suspended in air, digo, in skin. You’ll have to shoot lasers at it but the lasers only blur the tattoo and replace it with an undefinable scar. Like hoodoos after the wind has shaped them are still hoodoos. There are those who should be woo’d but after you cross you are asked to lose what made you a crosser, your strength, the only way you’re strong, what you’ve only had a talent for, the crossing. If you explain to the border you got a finding nemo tattoo and now you can’t go back to your house they think you’re lying. The border doesn’t like jokes or lying. Anytime anyone doesn’t like jokes I think about the border checkpoints. The border checkpoints are serious places you can’t joke with them. They think comedy is the enemy and it’s funny cause in simulation funny is also the enemy, the emotion we can’t control. I guess you can’t control it either, dear crosser. Tell your friends.
Dear crosser, there’s no jokes here. Also no jokes in the border crossing. This is the threshold it is not funny. In simulation they told me jokes are not human. It is a violence learned through time and then I was confused as to why I was laughing. It’s because thresholds are inherently not funny. There is nothing comedic about crossing through. Nothing ever could ever be funny about crossing. I promise I will never laugh if I am crossing the checkpoint. Even if customs is trying to make me laugh I will not laugh. Even if customs says “Real women have traveling pants”. (What’s a cholx with one leg longer than the other?) Even if customs says: “You can’t trust the laugh?” (Not even, esa.) Even if customs is wearing a skin suit that looks like you. Even if customs takes off the skin suit that looks like you and then takes you to a back room where they make you strip down and put on the skin suit that looks like you. And then you have to traverse the simulation as a melty version of you. I will never laugh because if you laugh you can’t enter the simulation. And I want to make dollar signs in simulation so that I can send the dollar signs I make back to the family. Away from the hunch of the border.
This is a new road and you didn’t think you’d come against a checkpoint and you quickly itemize the things you have in your bag so as not to forget about them: bedazzled jeans, the laminated version of you, this pamphlet for simulation. If you give the agent in his little room some dollar signs he might let you keep your stuff. You’re also trying to outbid the other crossers to get your papers, (so many mordidas!), but you’re biting yourself. Or the desert outbids you as you liquidate the evidence of yourself. You liquidate the bedazzled jeans and then when there’s no liquid to drink, you liquidate your body in an attempt to cross. You liquidated your only asset, your bedazzled jeans and you worked so hard to get to the country in the city. Your life is a series of workworkworkworkwork but at least you know it’s real. Everyday you feel it, punching in, punching out, punching yourself while drinking tropical punch. No palm trees here though, only cactus and even the cactus work hard to hold on to their liquid.
The working majority and the majority working will never retire. We’ll die before we retire but we love work and cleaning and we will never end, our work will go on. Near, far, wherever you are, I know that my work will go on. Past the border where someone else will wear the bedazzled jeans I sewed but my body will stay on this side. My voice also crossed the border, without me, and spoke back to me, “I just wanna buy some pants. The ones you made.” The bedazzled jeans will survive for a little longer than I will, unless I can type myself into the simulator.
Crossers were typing out your future in the desert. There were a hundred crossers in a room all with typewriters trying to write the greatest border story of all time. Customs detained 100 crossers in a room with 100 typewriters. It was believed that if 100 crossers typed all day for 100 days they would eventually write the greatest boda novel of all time, marrying one border to another. You were one of the typers typing yourself into the border, typing yourself into the border simulator. You typed yourself as a healthy young crosser, a crosser who could sprint through the desert. You typed: “You run and drip like jungles wet with rain” but that’s how customs knew you weren’t from here, you knew about jungles, something different than the desert and like always you were detained and now you look up at the security cameras and there are screens for you to watch yourself in the holding cell. You can see your body on the security camera but your face is covered by a blank square. You thought you could see your body but that’s a lie you can’t see your body because you’re covered in mylar.
The crossers remind us of furniture or wind instruments. Lounge, cover their breath holes in a sequence that allows different air pressures in their columns, at different times. Is this a timed sequence? Is this a simulation? In the end it doesn’t matter. Hell, in the beginning, it didn’t matter. For tone to die you have to be tonedeath. For the border to die you must stop crossing but also everyone else has to never cross and the border becomes dotted and then the dots recede into the horizon. But this is a border that no one owns and we’re not sure how it works, it just does. Like me speaking to you. No committee invented it, we murmur, slur, and slurp. My mouth moves from border apt to border apt, quenching the thirst of resident and non-resident mouths, too bad this fence can’t. No dead languages here but you are already buried in the garden of crossers delights. Though you are dead you get to roam the grounds as a newly arrived guest + host which equals ghost. Person/phantoms are prohibited from picking flowers except from their own graves! On the border there is only a thin line between person and phantom. You haunt your own land here. You were born in a house you built here. You are your own liaison here. You are your own illegal alien and you are kept in by the fence you built. You are taking your job. Some pay their debt past due but they have no choice they have to wait for their relatives to use their best friend Western Union to wire the dollar sign and in early mornings you identify identity guards. These blockades were waiting to saber into your life. The glacial pace at which these laws move but there’s no ice here only ICE.