BASS 2018: Cristina Henríquez, “Everything is Far From Here” from The New Yorker, July 2017

It’s rare that I start a story with what could properly be called an idea. For me, the seed is always language, and when the words come they open a path before me. So I wrote the first line – On the first day, there’s a sense of relief – and continued from there, letting the story reveal itself. It’s a scary way to write, and it requires a certain amount of faith….
Although most of the story came quickly, I did labor over the ending. The woman is unravelling, and I wanted the language to do that, too, for that final image to be one not of stasis but of movement, reflecting the change within the character, but also to evoke a kind of lyricism at odds with the bleakness of that change.

~~ Cristina Henríquez, Contributor Note

Last year, I wrote about context a lot as I blogged through the stories: how they were written in one era, and were read in another. This story suffers a bit from that same phenomenon. We’re inundated daily stories of children locked in cages in detention camps, in some cases virtually kidnapped. We see stories of parents told if they just agreed to deportation, they would get their kids back, but only half of that deal happened. Life imitates art, exceeds art in horror and pain. Reading this story was agonizing. But I find I have little to say about it, other than the ending Henríquez mentions in her Contributor Note. I might have felt differently when it was first published over a year ago, but now, it feels… exploitive, somehow. Let me emphasize that it isn’t, not at all – but it has suffered from timing.

Our protagonist doesn’t get a name, yet another way of stripping away her humanity as she waits in a detention center for her asylum hearing, and worries about her son, separated from her by the smugglers who brought them to the border:

The man who was leading them here divided the group. Twelve people drew too much attention, he claimed. He had sectioned off the women, silencing any protest with the back of his hand, swift to the jaw. “Do you want to get there or not?” They did. “Trust me,” he said.
He sent a friend to escort them. When she glanced back, she felt a shove between her shoulder blades. “It’s only for a few miles,” he hissed in her ear. “Walk.”
By morning, the men were gone, the children gone. The friend, a man with sunglasses and a chipped front tooth, said, “I am here to take care of you.” What he meant was that they were there to take care of him. Four women. Which they did. Which they were made to do.

Complete story available online at The New Yorker

In his post on this story, Jake Weber emphasizes that this is not the US-instigated family separation program that’s been such a source of contention; this was part of the process of the journey. The smugglers she’s entrusted herself and her son to are exploitive and abusive, not much better than the violence and rape she is escaping in the first place. This is what always strikes me when I hear these stories: these are people who have few choices, and all of them are bad.

We hear about other people in the detention center. And again, not everyone is nice. Some are scam artists; some are bitter and hardened. The woman keeps trying to find out about her son, with no luck. She thinks another woman’s child is her son. She gives up her only possession, a ring, to get information that turns out to be useless. She can’t even get a tampon. There is no kindness, no comfort. And as time goes on, the woman decompensates:

And then one day there are leaves on the trees, and wild-magnolia blossoms on the branches, bobbing gently in the breeze. She will stay in this place, she tells herself, until he comes. Through the window in the dayroom, she watches the white petals tremble, and, in a gust, a single blossom is torn off a branch. The petals blow apart, swirling, and drift to the ground.
She closes her eyes. Where has she gone and what has she become? The blisters have healed, the bruises have faded, the evidence has vanished—everything dissolves like sugar in water. It’s easy to let that happen, so much easier to give in, to be who they want you to be: a thing that flares apart in the tumult, a thing that surrenders to the wind.

Henríquez accomplished her goal admirably; there is a definite disintegration implied by the text, echoing the woman’s mental disintegration. The images – petals, sugar, flares – do evoke a kind of incongruent beauty, even as they signal the tragedy of a broken soul. Agonizing. Make it stop.