Ground Zero

On the morning of September 11, 2001, after the North Tower of the World Trade Center fell, killing some fourteen hundred people, firefighters rushed to the site with blueprints and floor plans, marking locations where they believed elevators and stairwells would have collapsed with the people they carried. They were looking for survivors. Global positioning technology plotted patterns formed by the spots where bodies, or parts of bodies, were found. But days went by and only sixteen people were found in the rubble, and it soon became clear that the mapping technology would be used to locate the dead.

The fires at Ground Zero were mean and hard to extinguish; they burned long and deep, flaring when exposed to oxygen and fueled by tons of highly combustible papers and furniture soaked in jet fuel. Thermal heat maps from NASA and the United States Geological Survey showed swaths of rubble burning at temperatures above 1,292 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than the melting point of aluminum. By December 3, 2001, New Scientist dubbed it “the longest-burning structural fire in history.” Officials continued to call Ground Zero a “rescue operation” — implying it was still possible to find survivors, but they couldn’t keep hope alive and at the same time submerge all sixteen acres with water and flame retardant — until the hundredth day of the fire, when the last flame was extinguished.

Rescue workers called the sixteen acres of debris on Ground Zero “the Pile.” The powdered debris in the Pile contained more than 150 compounds and elements, including plaster, talc, synthetic foam, glass, paint chips, charred wood, slag wool, two hundred thousand pounds of lead from fifty thousand computers, gold and mercury from five hundred thousand fluorescent lights, two thousand tons of asbestos, and ninety-one thousand liters of jet fuel. The nearly three thousand human beings who died made up a minuscule part of the debris. It was a site of desolation set on fire.

The first responders were firefighters and EMTs. The second responders were undocumented immigrants.

Lucero Gómez is a social worker who runs informal group therapy sessions with mostly undocumented, all-Latinx former Ground Zero cleanup workers. Lucero tells me that almost immediately after 9/11, undocumented immigrants started getting phone calls “from a very underground kind of network of people who are undocumented and need work. They called at night. They said, ‘Tomorrow there is work, come work.’” The city hired contractors — Americans, Anglo, white. The contractors hired subcontractors, many of them bilingual Latinx people with the golden ticket of American citizenship who could present themselves as friendly faces to other immigrants — “We look like you! We speak like you!” — and would make the eventual abuses unexpected. Vans drove from Queens out to Long Island, through Nassau and Suffolk Counties, up and down the immigrant enclaves, looking for day laborers to bring to Ground Zero. The workers were mostly Eastern European and Latin American. Many of the women knew the area well, having cleaned offices and apartments in Lower Manhattan for years. They knew they’d be called to dust. There was so much dust.

In 2001, Milton Vallejo had been working nights as a security guard at the World Trade Center. Milton is tall and gentle. On the morning of September 11, the day-shift guards, friends of his, came in to take over; he joked around with them for a bit, then headed to the subway. He was underground when the news hit. He couldn’t breathe. He raced home. He watched the news. He prayed to God. He had to help. It was his duty. Plus, work was work. The next day, he made his way back to the World Trade Center, now called Ground Zero. He found long lines of people waiting to enter the site. He wondered if he’d be asked to present his papers — the terrorists had been foreigners — and got out of line. An official of some kind — from where, he doesn’t remember — overseeing the line walked over and asked him why he left the line. Milton fumbled. The truth is, I’m not here legally, he said. Get back in line, she said. When it was his turn, she had him sign his name on a blank sheet of paper and compared his signature to the signature on his Colombian passport. “They made all of us sign on blank paper, then compared the signature to any ID we had. Then they let us in,” he says. 

“It looked like a Western, just like a desert,” Milton says. “Everything was dust and water and there was no light anywhere.” Milton was assigned to clean basements, where he waded waist-deep through dirty water and chemicals. He tied plastic grocery bags around his ankles. The dust was the hardest to clean because it blinded him and stuck to his wet clothing. He wasn’t given goggles. The subcontractors gave him air masks, but they were flimsy and broke easily. After a few days of work, Milton started spitting out mucus. Something scratched at the back of his throat, so he had to keep clearing it. It was wet and dry at the same time. After one week, he got his first paycheck from the subcontractor: $60 a day for working a twelve-hour shift; some days were longer than twelve hours. When he tried cashing the check, it bounced.

I first met Milton at one of Lucero’s group sessions in 2011. That day, the meeting was dedicated to a discussion of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, a law that promised to provide medical treatment to 9/11 first responders, survivors, and cleanup workers.

The people at Lucero’s sessions are all sick. They carry hospital ID cards issued by Mount Sinai and Bellevue, where they are treated. Many of them have developed cancer. They have rhinitis, gastritis, arthritis, severe acid reflux, asthma, high blood pressure, and back pain. They have PTSD, anxiety, depression, and paranoia. Their psychological symptoms are triggered by the smell of barbecue, by darkness, by any news coverage of natural disasters. The group helps them in some ways, but Lucero is just one person and cannot do it alone. Meetings are irregular.

When I return to visit the group again in early 2017, all anyone can talk about is deportation. A woman named Lourdes with two long braids reminds the group to be careful. She tells them to carry their prescription bottles around with them as well as their hospital ID cards to present to ICE officers should they be approached. She says ICE once entered her home, but they left her alone when she was able to prove that she was receiving treatment through a local hospital’s World Trade Center worker program. But that was one nice ICE officer, she says. Any of them could be deported at any time.

Contractors have mastered a plantation model in their line of work, exploiting whatever sense of community that might exist among Latinx people.

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Lucero doesn’t have much control over the group, which is rowdy. Everyone talks over one another and they sometimes answer their phones, screaming into them, while they’re still in their seats. One man, Enrique, is quiet for most of the meeting. He tells me that nothing happened to him that day, that he was spared. He is wearing a light windbreaker that he leaves open, and he repeatedly brings one side of the jacket close to his face to take a sip from a straw. A bottle, in a brown paper bag, is in the inside pocket.

Enrique says he doesn’t feel the effects of the cleanup, but that isn’t true. He has flashbacks to Ground Zero all the time. A few weeks ago, he was working on top of a six-foot ladder in Brooklyn and had a flashback to being surrounded by dank water, in the dark, next to fallen lights, shattered glass, and ash, the strong smell of mildew and chemicals soaking fabrics and furniture. He fell off the ladder and broke his arm. “I become suddenly frightened by absolutely nothing, like a cat,” he says.

Enrique was hired to work at Ground Zero by a company named Good Shine Cleaning, owned by a married Colombian American couple, American citizens. “The lines for cleaning jobs were hundreds of people long, and companies just picked everyone up and put us in trucks,” he remembers. “The Americans who own the contracting companies are all white. They hire Hispanic people to work as subcontractors and they’re the ones who deal directly with laborers.” Contractors have mastered a plantation model in their line of work, exploiting whatever sense of community that might exist among Latinx people. The workers think there are people along the chain of command who are watching out for them, but melanin and accents are ineffective binding substances.

I know the members of the therapy group struggle with mental illness, and when I ask, gently, what meds they’re on or what their panic attacks are like, they tell me but seem a little embarrassed. In our community, there is an ingrained idea that if you are sick, it’s a weakness, a symptom of our internalized bootstraps mythology. “You don’t have to pretend with me,” I say. We end up confiding in each other.

Milton attends the 9/11 group therapy meetings regularly, and when he sees me again, after so many years, he bows slightly, kisses my hand, and says, “Señorita Karla, you’ve returned.” He is on medication now, and it has helped, but at the beginning of his treatment, things were bad. “I tried to take my life,” he says. A psychologist who worked with some of the 9/11 survivors talked him down from overdosing on pills over the phone, reassuring him that he was loved. Milton also sees a psychiatrist who once talked him down from throwing himself onto the train tracks.

The chief tragedy in Milton’s life is the loss of his friend Rafael Hernández, a Mexican volunteer firefighter who also served as a 9/11 first responder. Milton met Rafael at a resting station for relief workers, where he saw him in a blue helmet. “It looked like he was wearing a costume,” he says. He asked Rafael if he spoke Spanish. “Uh, I’m Mexican,” Rafael replied. They became friends.

Rafael had been a firefighter in Mexico; he showed his Mexican firefighter badge to the first responders, and they geared him up. They didn’t care that he was foreign. They needed all the help they could get. As everyone else was running out of the buildings, Rafael ran up the North Tower. He encountered a pregnant woman whose water broke. She begged him not to leave her, and he didn’t. He reportedly carried her down twenty-eight flights of stairs. Not long after they made it out, the tower fell.

Rafael didn’t leave Ground Zero for months, working day after day. Eventually his lungs got so fucked up he had to be hooked up to a ventilator to sleep. He died in 2011, the ten-year anniversary of 9/11. 

Milton believes that he has been chosen by God to be a messenger for the Ground Zero undocumented workers, maybe for our people in general. He looks so damn earnest when he says this — not in the pathetic way that makes me want to kill myself, in the self-assured way that makes me feel like I’m back in my mother’s uterus — that I almost believe him. 

The first of our losses happened on September 11, 2001. Years later, during my freshman year at college, a popular topic of conversation in the dining hall was where you were on 9/11. I learned that no matter how far away you were from New York that day, no matter how distant your connection to that day was, no matter how much lower than zero the count of the people you lost on that day was, if you were white, 9/11 happened to you personally, with blunt and scalding force. Because the antithesis of an American is an immigrant and because we could not be victims in the public eye, we became suspects. And so September 11 changed the immigration landscape forever. Muslims and Sikhs became the targets of hate crimes. ICE was the creation of 9/11 paranoia. The Secure Communities deportation program would require local police to share information with Homeland Security. Immigration detention centers began to be managed by private prison groups. And New York State, as well as most other states, axed driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants.

I think about this often; that was the night my dad started dying. In this memory, my father comes home from work and I greet him in the doorway to give him a kiss hello and ask for his blessing. Do you know this custom? I’ve only seen Ecuadorians do it. You go up to your elders and say “Bendición,” and they kiss you or do the sign of the cross on your forehead and chest and say “Bendición.” It’s how you say hello or goodbye, like your de facto state is a state of cursedness and your elders can uncurse you, but only for a little while, so you have to keep asking. So I stand in the doorway in my bare feet and say, “Hello, Father. Blessing please.” He walks slowly and comes toward my body at a strange angle a child could only interpret as a terrible fall. He collapses onto me to cry into my neck. I’m little, but he does. Collapse, I mean. My father the dictator, heaving full-throated sobs. He hands me a letter. The letter says, in English, that Governor George Pataki has suspended driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants as part of a national security measure. My father has just lost his job as a taxi driver. He has also lost his state ID. Over the next twenty years, he’d lose many more things, but let’s put a little blue thumbtack on this memory map, the first place in hell we visited.

Paloma is an older member of Lucero’s support group. She talks like a mumble rapper, low and guttural and with a deliberate lack of enunciation. She can laugh and cry within seconds. Paloma is recovering from cancer, lives alone, and is severely traumatized. She says she is so afraid of ICE activity that she literally runs in and out of doctor appointments so they don’t catch her. Like, runs. She has installed surveillance cameras outside her apartment in case agents come to her door. “They don’t want us in this country,” she says. “We have to be careful.”

One Sunday I meet Paloma at the ten o’clock mass at Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in Queens, but she does not want me to sit with her. “You can meet me outside after,” she says. The church is filled with a couple hundred families. I take a seat in the back.

I meet Paloma outside after the service and we walk several blocks to La Hacienda, a Colombian restaurant that I remember loving as a child. On the way there, Paloma repeatedly walks into traffic. She doesn’t look both ways, she doesn’t even look one way, she just lunges in front of honking SUVs. I don’t say anything but link my arm through hers to guide her, at times pulling her back so she’s not hit by a car. Her vision is fine. I wonder if it’s a death wish, Freud something something, but then I notice that I can’t see more than a few feet ahead of me. Women roast corn and kebabs on makeshift grills on every corner, and cumbia blasts from record stores that still sell CDs. My senses feel rushed. It’s a short walk to the restaurant, but Paloma gets out of breath and struggles to talk on account of her ruined lungs. I get out of breath, too.

At the restaurant, she orders raspberry juice in milk and I order a Corona. Whenever I steer the conversation to 9/11, she begins to cry. Paloma had cleaned properties in Lower Manhattan that included international banks and — the irony — the former Immigration and Naturalization Service building. (INS was dissolved in 2003 and replaced by three new agencies, one of which was ICE .) On the morning of 9/11, she was working on the fortieth floor of a government building when a fire erupted in the elevator — the buildings around the World Trade Center were also damaged by the blasts — and the workers had to flee down the stairs. She left a shoe behind. The building was still smoking when they returned to clean. “We even ate on top of the dust,” she says. “Yes, we were heroes, but the dangers of the job were hidden from us so that we could work. If they had put up a sign at the site listing what we could come to face, we wouldn’t have gone in.”

Paloma has a string of illnesses that are common to all of the cleanup workers — sleep apnea, PTSD, depression, anxiety, gastrointestinal issues. She also has breast cancer. She can’t work because her bones hurt, and she often gets fevers, chills, and vertigo. She is waiting for the Zadroga Act to send her a compensation check, which some friends have already received, friends who don’t even have cancer.

After she finishes her juice, she leans close to me and tells me about Cruz. Cruz is a little older than she is. Cuban. When he was young, he was bad, served his time, but he’s clean now. They met when he was working delivering furniture and delivered a refrigerator to her home. He told her he liked her — a straight shooter, which she admired — and he gave her his phone number. Six months passed, and she called him one evening. “I was bored,” she says, giggling. They went out for cappuccinos and talked all night. He wasn’t scared by her baggage, by the depression and panic attacks, and she comforted him because he had been recently widowed. Cruz wants to marry Paloma, but she won’t divorce her husband back home in Colombia, even though soon after she left, he began dating their children’s teenage nanny, because when he dies Paloma is entitled to part of his pension. She and the nanny will split it. I love this woman.

Paloma was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010. Her doctors believe the cancer is linked to her elevated exposure to toxins during the post-9/11 cleanup work. The news made Paloma feel bitter, hopeless, and punished by God. Surely He was punishing her for abandoning her children in Colombia. What kind of mother would do that? She threw herself into church, into prayer. She spends a lot of time online watching Christian movies and reading Christian blogs. “I’m more than a believer,” she says. “I’m a fanatic. I see Jesus Christ right in front of me, as real as I see you.”

At first, Cruz would accompany Paloma to her doctor appointments. After her surgery, he hid in the hospital room so he wouldn’t be kicked out after visiting hours and could spend the night with her. But she was getting ready to die. She took all her savings, including a little compensation money she had received from the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, and traveled to Panama alone. The first vacation of her life. Then she went back to Colombia, why else but to die, to die in her homeland surrounded by family, which seemed appropriate, even if she knew they wouldn’t give her a hero’s welcome, and they didn’t. Then, at a routine doctor appointment in Colombia, the doctor told her that she was cancer-free. “I said, I’m out of here!” she says, and she peaced out just like that. She came back to the United States by a means I am not going to disclose. She arrived in Las Vegas, and Cruz rented a truck in New York, driving for days to pick her up and bring her back to the city. On their road trip, they’d drive for seven-hour stretches, then stop at the closest town to explore. “It was a special trip,” she says. “One of the most special moments of my life. Can you believe he did that?” At an appointment in New York, the doctor told her he had bad news. The cancer was back, and it was aggressive. After several rounds of chemotherapy, Paloma is too weak to work, and her savings are depleted.

Like Paloma, some of the members of Lucero’s group have already received a few thousand dollars here and there through the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, a federal program for proven victims of the attacks and their living relatives. The man in charge of evaluating the first wave of applications for the fund was Kenneth R. Feinberg, a lawyer who had successfully settled the Agent Orange lawsuits on behalf of the US government. He had unlimited funds but a clear end date. Though later expanded, the fund initially stopped accepting applications in December 2003, a time when many individuals were only beginning to exhibit symptoms. Workers who did not make that deadline fell back on unsubsidized treatment in city hospitals or workers’ compensation payments. Treatment options were slim for undocumented immigrants.

Over the phone, Feinberg tells me he thinks that the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund is “an extraordinary example of inclusiveness.”

“At the urging of attorney general John Ashcroft, we promulgated that no immigrant in the country illegally would be harmed. We translated the application and rules into four languages, including Spanish, Korean, maybe French. We made sure that all immigrants were given the opportunity for free legal counsel. We held town hall meetings in the Bronx where we explained to surviving immigrants that the death of their husbands would in no way prevent them from filing.” He laughs. “I can’t think of a federal program more inclusive and respectful of diversity.”

But in order for victims to be recognized by the Victim Compensation Fund, they have to show paperwork proving they worked at Ground Zero or lost someone that day. The undocumented often work in clever ways to leave no paper trail. There is no telling how many were killed, because restaurant owners and managers have refused to come forward with the names of missing people for fear that they will be fined for employing undocumented laborers. Deliverymen lost their brothers that day. Some men worked the graveyard shift — between midnight and 8 AM — and were finishing up their last deliveries and going home when the planes struck. Advocacy organizations like Asociación Tepeyac worked tirelessly to field calls from families who had not heard from a loved one, and later to help the men and women who cleaned up Ground Zero. Dr. Charles Hirsch, New York City’s chief medical examiner at the time, became “the gatekeeper to the official list” of World Trade Center victims. The final list contained 2,753 names of people whose deaths had been ruled homicides. These 2,753 names would be inscribed on the memorial as the list of victims from the towers. The chief medical examiner’s office said that there were no more missing people. A few weeks after the towers fell, the city gave families who reported disappearances an urn containing Ground Zero ashes. In 2011, the Mexican consulate held its own memorial service, reading the names we know and praying for the names we don’t.

Sometimes he was told to keep the change—a quarter. Sometimes he was tipped in pennies.

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After my father lost his job as a taxi driver, he found a job as a deliveryman at a restaurant down in the Financial District. Deliverymen in that area call themselves “delivery boys.” Throughout my teens, I always corrected my father when he said this because I assumed the guys had heard it from some white supremacist boss who was trying to emasculate them and that they accepted it as a neutral term. It made me furious. “There’s a history to white people calling men of color ‘boys,’” I would tell him.

In the mornings, my father would deliver breakfast to offices in the Financial District. A raisin bagel with cream cheese and coffee with hazelnut creamer. A blueberry muffin and black coffee; two cranberry scones and three coffees, two creams, one sugar. A single croissant, and a single coffee, sent back because it was brought with white sugar and not Splenda. Bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches. Oatmeal with brown sugar. Yogurt parfaits. Orange juice and a banana. A chamomile tea. A granola bar and a chocolate milk. There was no delivery minimum, so my father delivered it all. Because the deliveries were so small, sometimes he didn’t get a tip. Sometimes he was told to keep the change — a quarter. Sometimes he was tipped in pennies. He had to say, “Thank you, sir.” “Thank you, ma’am.” 

My father didn’t use a bike; he made all his deliveries on foot. He speed-walked while carrying many heavy bags of food to offices on Wall Street. The plastic handles of the bags would twist and cut into his fingers, and he eventually developed large calluses on both his hands. His polyester pants rubbed up against his calves so much that he eventually lost all the hair on his legs. They’re smooth as a baby’s bottom, even now. He went through many pairs of inexpensive black rubber shoes. My mother massaged his feet at night. My dad’s feet are small and fat, like mine, so you can’t tell when they’re swollen. After a few years, my dad’s feet would hurt so much that he walked like he was on hot coals, sometimes leaning on me to move from the couch to the bed. “Ay ay ay ay,” he’d say as he limped, like a mariachi. Most of my dad’s coworkers were Mexican, and he learned how to cook Mexican food from them and he learned Mexican swear words, which my mom hated. Some of them were young, teenagers, and my dad would scold them and tell them to go back to school. He made his first gay friend at that restaurant. They called him Che, because he was Argentine.

When I was in high school, my dad began to share stories he’d heard about undocumented restaurant workers who’d died on 9/11. I decided to interview my dad’s coworkers for the first piece I ever pitched, for the Tribeca Trib. They were the only other undocumented people I knew. I had just watched All the President’s Men and wanted to break a story.

My father picked whom I could talk to, and he chaperoned the interviews. He bought me a yellow flip notebook because I was pretending to be a journalist and he knew that would make me feel important. He also bought me a tape recorder from Kmart. I never actually managed to talk to anyone who directly knew an undocumented restaurant worker who died on 9/11, but everyone had heard the stories.

The undocumented immigrants who died on 9/11 worked in restaurants, in housekeeping, in security. They were also deliverymen. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum now stands where the Twin Towers once stood. They have an exhibit that gutted me when I saw it. It’s a bicycle, presumed to have belonged to a deliveryman, a bike that was left tied to a pole near the Twin Towers. Visitors to the site had left acrylic flowers — red, white, and blue roses and carnations. They also left a rosary on the bicycle. It became a makeshift memorial. There was a note on the street next to the bike: en memoria de los delivery boys que murieron. Sept 11 2001. “In memory of the delivery boys who died.” Delivery boys. That’s how I know it was the delivery boys who put up that sign, who left those acrylic flowers, men like my dad.

I wonder what the bike owner brought to the Twin Towers that day. It was September, a mild day, so maybe an iced coffee. Black. Probably a scone. Maybe a $4.50 breakfast. A 15 percent tip would be sixty-seven cents. A 20 percent tip would be ninety cents. A generous person might tip a dollar. My father would travel anywhere for a dollar. My father would chase a dollar down the road, a dollar blowing in the winds of a hurricane, even when there was an equal likelihood of getting swept up by the wind. My dad would always take the chance. A dollar is a dollar.

There was Antonio Meléndez, and Antonio Javier Álvarez, and Leobardo López Pascual, and Juan Ortega-Campos, and Martín Morales Zempoaltécatl, and Arturo Alva Moreno, and José Manuel Contreras Fernández, and Germán Castillo Galicia, and José Guevara González, and Alicia Acevedo Carranza, and Víctor Antonio Martínez Pastrana, and Juan Romero Orozco, and Jorge Octavio Santos Anaya, and Margarito Casillas, and Norberto Hernández.

There was also Fernando Jiménez Molinar, who worked at a pizza shop nearby, delivering pies and washing dishes. He was 19 years old. (My brother is 19 years old. Jesus Christ, the hair above my brother’s lip, he’s so proud of it that he doesn’t shave. He writes spoken-word poetry and keeps a dream journal. I bought it for him; it has Batman on the cover. He collects comic books.) Fernando had two roommates, undocumented like him, and they called his mom when he didn’t come home on the night of 9/11. A local Mexican organization looked everywhere for him. He was gone. The first tower fell shortly before 10 AM. Who wanted a pizza delivered that early? Probably a finance bro coked up after a long night lying with numbers. Maybe he was high on Adderall. Hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours and was finally hungry, but only for pizza. Probably a little older than Fernando, maybe 22 or 23. Harvard grad. Bro, is that my pizza?

Fernando’s mom didn’t want him to come to America. He went anyway. He grew out his hair into a ponytail and grew a beard. That’s what the newspapers say. But he was 19, and I know 19. Nice beard. His sneakers were clean, white, like a fool’s. My father always told his teenage coworkers not to get white sneakers, and they always did anyway. Slaves to fashion. Earbuds in his ears. Metallica. Mexicans and their Metallica. It’s not racist when I say it. It was bright and sunny that day. His life ahead of him. The day ahead of him. His mom still young. He could still change her life. He could still tell his father off. The pizza delivery would net him $5. That’s a calling card. He could call his mom, but the entire card would be spent on her sending him blessings. He wanted to buy her a house. A garden where she could grow her own flowers; she loved marigolds, not bodega flowers like rainbow-colored carnations — marigolds. The house would have one room for her, and an office where she could read her Bible. The edges of the pages were colored gold. He would get his mom a dog so she wouldn’t be lonely. She liked frilly things, so maybe she’d like a poodle, but he wanted to get her a German shepherd, something to protect her, bark if anyone but him approached the house. So many people had hurt his mother, but not again. Not under his watch. His mother, his saint. Sometimes he’d swing by hair salons and steal the lady magazines and send them to her. Sometimes when he called she’d describe the dresses she loved from the magazines over the phone, and he resolved to buy them. She loved silk. His mother never knew silk. He’d make her know silk. He’d make her know death. He’d make her know silence. He’d make her know the death mask of a man disappeared, incinerated, and gone. Fernando Jiménez Molinar? Was he ever alive?

Did you know that before dialing Mexico, you have to dial 011? There are so many numbers to dial to get to your mother. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0. You learn those numbers young. The jet-fuel smell thick in the air, the flame and smoke surrounding you, you can only get to 011 and that’s enough to make you foreign, to make you other, to make you Mexican. You take out your wallet and put an ID between your teeth so they can find you when it all collapses. Your flesh may burn but your teeth will remain and the ID will be there. It’s a fake ID. Nobody will ever know you died. Nobody will ever know you lived.