From daybreak it was clear the world had woken up in a bad mood. The sun threw heat at the frozen earth but only squandered its effort. And when the Arizona desert has trouble being what it is – roasted and shimmering with doom - odds are the day is bound to be a struggle. Cyril Divakov sucked in the dry air, picked up the aluminum mug from the dust and studied the coffee grounds smeared over its walls. All night he had been tormented by an anxiety to read his fortune.

“I see a blazing sun, hot like a toaster oven,” he announced, “and a road that leads to the middle of nowhere and evaporates into thin air.”  

“It is where we go?” with concern asked Ludovic Guily, Cyril Divakov’s sole companion. His French accent hung in the air like a powerful smell. 

Cyril Divakov shook his head and repeated the words of his grandmother, a gypsy who had once been married to a eunuch.

“A road that ends before its time can only indicate a new beginning.”

He was a button of a man with a head topped by a cloud of black curls. Five days of crossing the desert had turned his pasty face into brown leather but it didn’t matter: the spirit of adventure and the purpose of a great mission had infected him even in his current risky situation.

He urinated over the fire and kicked sand on top to smother it. The blood hounds from Border Patrol could spot one’s lost memories from nine mountains away, not to mention a column of cactus ash smoking into the crisp sky. Mexico was forty miles behind and a barren mountain loomed ahead. To the naked eye it was yellow rock parched by a vicious sun - but the topographic map suggested deep canyons slashed by flash floods. Thin snow covered the highest peaks.  

“These are the Cimarron Mountains,” he said. “After them it’s downhill to the freeway. Ten hours by bus and we’re on the Santa Monica pier.”       

Tears of exhaustion welled up in Guily’s eyes.

“I know, brother” Cyril Divakov said. “I’ll carry the tent.”

From day one Guily had refused to carry anything but an old guitar that he used for playing French songs of yearning.

“I am not a fanatic like you,” Guily liked to say. “You can force your body to go when it refuses.”  

They lumbered up the mountain in steep switchbacks and new blisters cooked Cyril Divakov’s feet. The sun squeezed the air and gave him a migraine that drew vomit. His backpack was forty pounds overweight with food and clothes for both of them but it would be outrageous of him to complain: to be able to wander across the American Southwest was already a miracle. Three years before, he had been deported from the country after a decade of pushing his phony asylum application through the loopholes of the immigration system. Disaster had arrived just as he was about to earn his doctorate in astrophysics from that unrivaled factory for geniuses, the California Institute of Technology. A week before defending his dissertation - a complex design to deploy giant mirrors across the universe to let us look into our past - two INS officers interrupted his lunch in the university cafeteria and escorted him to the airport in handcuffs.  

There was nothing that waited for him in the old country but a vacant house and the disgrace of coming back with empty hands. Home was as he remembered it: poverty, envy, and corruption, a place where lofty minds were left to rot. It took him less than a day to escape the country again. For the next three years he broke his back in menial jobs in twenty four countries and five continents and starved to save each penny. He rode buses, trains, ships, and a submarine on his long journey back to California. In Mexico City he encountered Ludovic Guily, a vagrant living on a floating island in the canals of Xochimilco. The two men shared Guily’s jar of mescal and Cyril Divakov’s stories about the clashes of galaxies and the vagueness of time. Guily did not believe a word but still came along because he recognized Cyril Divakov as one of those unrelenting idealists who shoot at the moon until it falls at their feet, warm and smelling of gunpowder.  

That night seemed of another lifetime in the blasted rocks of the Cimarron Mountains.

“I read in a newspaper,” Guily gulped for air, “that you can live in America for thirty years and they can still kick you out.”

His face was red and he looked ready to faint. A wave of righteous indignation rose within Cyril Divakov.  

“You’ve only heard the nice stories then,” he said. “They deport single mothers and split them from their babies, and send the babies to orphanages. And nobody knows what happens with the border-crossers after they’re thrown in detention centers.”

It was a depressing topic that was better left to die. They crested the front range of the mountain; on the top the wind whipped them across the faces. A deep canyon opened before them, chiseled by a creek that was dry in the winter. Cyril Divakov kept the route close to the top, looking down into a thousand feet of naked slope. Saguaro cacti the size of palms covered the canyon walls; in the upper elevations they wore snow caps that even the mid-day sun could not melt. Caves gaped from the rocks above and turkey vultures circled the sky. Cyril Divakov smiled at them: he knew the mind of a scavenger.

“Merde!” a shriek shattered the quiet.

Guily stood with a leg frozen in mid air as a diamondback rattled before him with an erect tail and a hissing tongue.

“Did it bite you?” Cyril Divakov shouted.

“I don’t know!”

The coffee Cyril Divakov had consumed surged back into his throat. He grabbed a rock and flung it at the snake.

“Don’t make it mad!” Guily cried.

The reptile slid away but crept back. Cyril Divakov threw a foot at it and felt contact. In moments like these the adrenaline in his veins was more potent than a donkey’s kick. He grabbed the rattler’s head and glared into its eyes: what would happen if you bit him, he wanted to scream, and was choked with wrath at this lack of consideration. He spat at the snake and his lips touched the cold tongue. Who knows what else he might have done if an awareness of the useless rage inside him hadn’t opened his mind to reason. He threw the rattler into the brush.     

“What are you doing!” Guily screamed. “Kill it!” 

“Keep track of your feet, brother!” Cyril Divakov said. “I can’t tie your laces at every step!”

An aftershock of guilt jolted him and with good reason: snapping at his partner was a prodigal way to challenge fate. Even a weak man is not always useless. Where would Cyril Divakov be without the refill of hope that Guily’s songs brought each night? He apologized, but by then the Frenchman was flushed and his chin was quivering. He blinked a few times to clear his eyes.

“I suppose I’ve been a burden more than you expected.”

“Nonsense!” Cyril Divakov said. “You’ve kept me from losing my mind.”

The chill of the snake’s tongue lingered on his lips and he threw up. As he was burying the vomit with dirt, a flurry of snow pinched his skin. Within a minute a blizzard descended with snowflakes thick and white like grated feta cheese. The wind attacked the two men in spurts, threatening to blow them over, then vanishing to leave silence and the smell of dust.

“Who in hell has heard of snow in the desert!” Guily cried.

“It happens every winter.”

There are times when life can ambush us with arctic cold and enough doubts to muddy the faith of a pope. As Cyril Divakov waited out the storm inside the tent, wrapped in a sleeping bag and holding a warm glove over his nose, he was overtaken by a sea of melancholy. Freezing in the desert, evicted from civilization, molested by snakes and fleeing the Border Patrol had corrupted the noble pursuit of science he had once envisioned.

“You are my son and I’m the first one to know that you will be immortal,” his mother had told him before he first left for America. A phone call six years later had brought him the news of her death. She had perished alone, corroded by illness and exiled in a house haunted by the ghost of her only son. He missed the funeral because the lie he had devised to stay in the United States kept him locked in the country until his case was reviewed. His mother was buried by neighbors, and four years later Cyril Divakov was deported anyway. She would sink in shame now if she knew that all he could attain in return for abandoning her was a slab of muck to perch his tent on.    

He caught himself escaping into sleep, so he cut his thumb with a pocket knife and poured salt over the wound to sharpen the pain. His grandfather had done the same to prevent himself from dozing off during the guerilla wars. Guily observed with fear and excitement, as if he was standing by a wild animal.

“The white death will take us if we fall asleep,” Cyril Divakov explained.

They did not speak until the afternoon and listened to the voices of the wind howling in the caves above them. When it became clear that the white confusion outside was only gaining force, Cyril Divakov urinated on his cut finger to disinfect the wound.

“We’ll go to the bottom of the canyon,” he said.

They scrambled down the precipitous grade, pushed by the weight of their backpacks, digging their heels to stop the slide and starting avalanches of dirt. Cyril Divakov fell many times and impaled his hand on a cactus. It caused him much pain but there was nothing he could do. By the time they reached the bottom they were covered in brown earth. Their thighs had turned to mush and could not carry them but they walked on anyway along the shoulder of the streambed.

They had barely covered a hundred yards when an explosion of rifles blasted the rocks at their feet and made sawdust of Guily’s guitar.  

“Acuesta te en el suelo!” a voice screamed. “Pon tus manos detras de tu cabeza!”

Cyril Divakov threw himself on the frozen dirt; it was close to a minute before his heart began to beat again. Two men jumped from the rocks. They looked like cowboys, well-fed and big-boned, wearing coats of sheep skin and Stetson hats, and holding rifles. One was Latin, with a thin beard and blue skin, the other one was blond and pink and his eyes shined red when they caught light. Over the next few hours Cyril Divakov would piece together that the thin-bearded one was called Moctezuma, Mocty to his companion, and the blonde was Childs.

The men wanted to know the citizenship of Cyril Divakov and Guily, and Cyril Divakov lied, under Guily’s terrified gaze, that they were American. He began to explain that they were backpackers who had escaped into the desert to cleanse their souls from the monotony of everyday life, but as he spoke blood pounded against the walls of his head and tears of terror burned his eyes. A cruel premonition told him that his mission had exploded like a bag of popcorn.

Mocty unearthed Cyril Divakov’s foreign passport; there was a kindness in his voice that rang with a string of terror. “Are you aware of the punishment for entering the United States illegally?”  

Cold moisture contracted around Cyril Divakov’s testicles.

“Don’t be afraid!” Mocty noticed. “We’re not monsters.”

They were minutemen, a civilian militia who stalked the border and apprehended illegal immigrants. “We guard the borders because the government quit giving a damn,” Mocty explained.

They had lost their way after Childs had driven their truck into the mud during the blizzard; it now sat on its side at the other end of the canyon. From Cyril Divakov’s backpack they pulled out a stash of credit cards, a California driver license and a notebook of rocket trajectory plans.  He tried to explain that those were the pages of his dissertation, the calculations for the deployment of his mirrors reflecting the past, but his tongue was dry and stuck to his pallet and few of his words sounded coherent.

“I wonder,” Childs said, “what kind of undocumented students cross the asshole of geography loaded with credit cards and missile plans.”

The Minutemen tied Cyril Divakov and Guily with climbing rope and ate all of their beef jerky. The tent went up but the two captives were left out; screaming at it brought them only hoarse throats. The Minutemen had left Cyril Divakov’s legs free but chances were it was a pretext to shoot him in flight. He should have spat in those animals’ faces when he had a chance.

“Goddamn country!” Guily cried. “Someone should run an airplane into this pile of dirt!”

“Don’t take it out on the country because of a couple of roaches, brother” Cyril Divakov said. “People know how to think big here, when the rest of the world fights over a bone and a puddle to drink from.”

He had no cover other than his wet coat and when the pain from the cold became unbearable he passed out. When the morning sun tickled him awake and he heard the gurgle of melting snow, he was surprised to be alive. The sky was blue and the walls of the canyon glistened with new water.

“Do you know what the power of the Minutemen is, boys?” Childs said. He had been waiting for them to wake up. “Flexibility and passion: we are not slaves of politicking and we love our country to death.”   

He rubbed his teeth clean with toothpaste and a finger and spat out the mixture.

“I’ve been wrestling with a question,” he went on. “How do we distinguish if a border-crosser isn’t in truth an uglier and more perilous element, like a terrorist funded to produce missiles on our own front lawn? If I were one I’d surely come in by the coyote routes. Nobody’s looking for me here, am I right or am I right?”

It was enough rope for Cyril Divakov to hang himself. He pled his case that he was a doctor of science, that all he cared about was creating a fail-proof system to correct our past mistakes by being able to see back to the beginning of time, and still the Minutemen refused to understand. The sun pounded his bare head and his migraine returned. Despair crept over his skin like a rash. After six hours of interrogation in which he wept, begged, cursed and threatened, he succumbed to their wishes, if only to save his sanity. He planned to destroy America by aiming shooting stars at its famous buildings, he told them, and by drowning its cities in stardust. At first they did not believe him but he convinced them through the black flames in his eyes. Guily begged him to stop because he thought the Minutemen would kill them, but by then Cyril Divakov believed in his infernal plans more than his own accusers. When his account had crossed the line of good taste, a fist punched him in the chest and felled him on his back.

“Just like I was suspecting,” Childs said.

Fingers handled Cyril Divakov’s crotch and unzipped his pants. He was embarrassed by the pungent odor of his underwear because he had not changed it in five days of sweating and rationing toilet paper.

“The gnome is not an Arab!” Childs said. “But it takes little to make him into one.”

Cyril Divakov was startled to sense fingers touching his uncircumcised penis. They peeled and rubbed the sensitive head and a Swiss Army knife changed hands. He screamed and tried to see where it went but Mocty leaned on his head. Cyril Divakov begged them not to hurt him, he cried like a sick child and his mouth filled with a foul breath. A monsoon of tears poured out without permission. Shame, rage, a pathetic impotence and a numbing sense of doom tore his guts. His bowels expelled feces and his urine flowed onto the hands of Childs, who jumped and began thrusting them to cast off the filth.  

“Goddamn savage! I should’ve castrated you for real!” 

Cyril Divakov lay on his back with his eyes wide open. In the outskirts of his mind a flock of ravens circled the sky in anguish. A deep rumble approached and made the earth shudder as if from a bad omen, before it dissipated for a moment and let the mountain reclaim a nervous silence. The yellow rocks stepped back in fear, a rattler slid behind a cactus, Mocty’s stomach made a gurgling noise. Then - a frothing torrent of mud and boulders crashed through the canyon with the speed of a curse. It swept the tent and the people and shot them across the narrows where the surge rose to a height of two hundred feet and jammed mounds of debris between the rock walls.    

As the mud carried him off Cyril Divakov prepared to enjoy his well-earned peace and used the time to compose a speech of apology to his mother. She would be sad since seeing him would ruin her belief in his immortality. And astrophysics, his seductress, would be lost forever: the very idea of it threw a dagger into his heart. It was not a small detail to consider. Could it be the signature of a real man to abandon his dreams in mid-stride, to quit with such facility? He was about to find the answer when the current lifted him toward the heavens, then slammed him against a rock and knocked him out. 

He woke up hanging like a bat from a ball of debris logged three stories up into the air. A few twists of his feet and gravity set him plummeting toward the solid earth - when Guily materialized underneath and caught Cyril Divakov into his arms.

“I found my guitar,” he said. “It has been blown off to smithereens and is completely unusable.”

By reason or whim, Cyril Divakov should have fled then and there. Why risk falling into the hands of enemies a second time? Why taunt fate again? True and true, but surviving the onslaught of nature had given him evidence of his own invincibility. Wet and freezing, he spent the day excavating up and down the canyon with the resolve of a grave robber. Guily followed him around, demanding to know what they were still doing in this cursed wasteland. But how could Cyril Divakov explain? His pride demanded he prove to his enemies that he was doing nothing bad, to teach them a lesson about the book and the cover.

Pieces of Childs were scattered across a mile of mud, while Mocty clutched to life with two broken legs and a concussion. Cyril Divakov dragged the living man to higher ground and used fingers to pull his eyelids open.  

“Do you want to know now why I’m here?”

“You want to be a squatter in my country,” Mocty said.

Cyril Divakov leaned forward until their noses touched. “You despise me but in ten years in America I’ve accomplished more than you can dream of in two lifetimes.”

“I don’t despise you,” Mocty said. “I love my country, that’s all. If a bum breaks into your house and eats your kids’ food, do you let him sleep with your wife too?”

“I have a doctorate from the most prestigious science university in the world, which waived its entire tuition for me!”

“Maybe they did. All you have to show is a deportation stamp.”

Cyril Divakov kicked Mocty’s broken leg. Mocty choked from the pain but remained conscious; his eyes filled with tears and he scanned the harsh terrain with tenderness.

“The Apache used to spend the summer in this canyon,” Mocty said. “You can still hear them inside the caves. And right over the mountain, down that gulch, there’s a place called Sweet Water. The settlers that came, they knew a good joke when they saw one; it’s nothing but a dry lake covered with salt. You can still trace their tracks there. Sometimes they vanish in the middle as if the people got snatched by aliens: it’s where gunslingers would ambush them for gold. Bones are scattered all over around there; the rattlers nest on them.” 

Cyril Divakov picked up some snow and sucked on it. He didn’t want to hear any of this.

“It is a mythical land, this place you’re trespassing onto,” Mocty said. “We had to know your plans.”

Cyril Divakov snorted a laugh and felt sick. 

“We were not going to hurt you,” Mocty added.

“Liar!” Cyril Divakov screamed. The image of the blade reaching for his organ flashed in before him. His eyes turned wet. He felt Mocty’s reassuring hand on his and jerked away. Mocty’s face filled with great pity.

“You cannot understand me because you despise your own country.”

Cyril Divakov hit him but shook with weakness like a parent confronting his child’s murderer. His eyes watered and his muscles ached. He couldn’t conceal the anger that was eating him. What was he doing here? What sick vanity had convinced him to seek the approval of a minion like Mocty? A man has to be tough, not only with himself but with the world around him. When life swings at you, you swing back. It was time to leave, away from this place, far from this day.

Mocty begged them to take him: there was no food except lizards and snakes and he would have to fight for them with the vultures and the cougars, he would die from cold or gangrene or the jaws of a beast.  

“A man like you should know how to lie in the bed he has made for himself,” Cyril Divakov cut him off and walked away. Guily followed. 

For hours they scrambled over debris and waded cesspools of green water that stunk of animal carcasses. The mud stole Cyril Divakov’s boots and he continued barefoot. His clothes dried and his body gained warmth and then the sun set and he was cold again. He tried to stay focused on tomorrow’s promises but the canyon behind him cut into his thoughts like an ingrown nail. And what was there to think twice about? Mocty had invited his black fortune through his own spite and prejudice. When had Cyril Divakov hurt the man - or any other fascist like him? He had salvaged Mocty out of the mud, when anybody with half a brain would have let him rot. So why was Cyril Divakov standing trial before his own conscience for refusing to save that reptile?

Black darkness had buried the Earth by the time the mountain ended. Wind hit the two men from many directions and a sky of stars opened ahead. It was a night of agony that could freeze a man’s spit. Even after the sun materialized on the next morning, the scale barely touched thirty. Cyril Divakov woke up before Guily. Behind him were the mountains they had crossed and ahead lay a vast desert where a man could breathe again. The earth around him was white and tasted like salt because they had reached the ancient lakebed of Sweet Water. The Jeep that Mocty and Childs had abandoned lay on its side in a puddle of brine. Bones bleached by the sun were strewn until the eye could see. Cyril Divakov stepped on them and found them stronger than steel and more flexible than hard rubber, because the obstinacy of the men they had once belonged to had made them indestructible.    

The wild emptiness touched Cyril Divakov, it made him human again for the first time since his deportation. It was worth suffering a thousand and one nights of torture just to let your mind loose in a land this big - but you had to enter it free of fears and a guilty heart. A knot of anguish was squeezing his guts and spoiling his enjoyment of liberty. He stretched his eyes until he could see over the curvature of the earth and spotted the freeway traffic crawling along like a procession of ants. He knitted bones into a complication of levers and lifted the Jeep. The engine rumbled on but could not wake up Guily, who was sleeping in a coma of exhaustion. Cyrill Divakov drew a big arrow in the salt and wrote:

“Drive until you reach the freeway and turn left.”  

On the trail back into the mountains his heart beat against his chest with such vigor that he paused often to make sure it had not cracked a rib. By the time the sun weighed over the peaks, he had found Mocty surrounded by vultures. Cyril Divakov threw a rock at the scavengers and they retreated, provisionally and without conviction.

“Tell me, border-crosser,” Mocty asked, “how far do you think you’ll get with this goddamn back and forth?”

Cyril Divakov blew off black mucus from his nose and gave Mocty a hand.

“All the way,” he said.

He lifted Mocty on his shoulders and started the long way back to Sweet Water. The last rays of the sun threw heat on him and the air smelled of wet earth. His bare feet were bleeding and his back threatened to collapse but he did not need them to go on. His mind was flying ahead, to the end of the mountain, along the freeway, through the streets of Los Angeles, behind the lenses of telescopes and across the universe. The fears, the doubts and the guilt he had worn like birthmarks had fled, not because he had defeated them with reason, but because he had scared them away with his infuriating stubbornness to keep on dreaming.