In four years Caitlin will walk up the stairs of a barn in a cornfield wearing a white lace dress and a peony in her hair and become my wife, but presently I’ve known her for three weeks and a sheriff pulls her out of the driver’s seat and walks her along the interstate to his unmarked SUV. Yesterday I told her I loved her and she didn’t say it back, but we’re still on our way to Chicago so that I can introduce her to my parents. Moments ago the cabin of her black Mercedes felt like it contained the entire universe—the jelly in our brains flooded repeatedly in a warm dopamine bath with every word, look, touch. Now I’m trying to read her lips in the rearview while she’s in the cop car talking. A second sheriff stands just outside my open passenger side window smiling, his hand resting on the butt of his gun. In the time it took to pull the car over I’ve gone from replaying the previous day in my mind, a day spent having sex and eating cherries in bed, to thinking about how peace officers typically load hollow points which splinter into tissues creating a maximal wound cavity and maximal destruction. He crouches and makes small talk, which I know is his attempt to get me to talk so that he and his partner can use any inconsistency in our answers to manufacture probable cause and search the vehicle. I can see that his eyes have become fixed on the fresh stick and poke on my left forearm, a large black nopal tattooed a month ago in a punk house in Arizona the night I came out of the desert where a group left gallons of water so people would not die breaking into the country that destroyed theirs. I imagine he takes what I love about the tattoo, its grainy uneven lines, as proof he’s stumbled onto something. He asks me where I’m coming from, where I’m going, who the woman I’m traveling with is and I tell him we’re in love, we met in graduate school, and I’m taking her to meet my parents in Chicago because I think she’s The One. There is a universe in which I don’t then ask if I can retrieve my university ID before doing so and his perception and his hollow points put an end to all the eventualities that have come to pass in this one, eventualities with names and birthdates that like to squirm into the spoon-shaped cavity my body makes when I sidesleep. In that universe they don’t whisper “I love you, Daddy,” into the morning’s first light. When I ask, he smiles and nods and the knuckles on his gun hand go white and I move very very slowly. He looks at the ID and he looks at me and keeps asking more questions and I tell him I’ve said everything I’m going to say and light a cigarette and blow smoke in his general direction without directly blowing it into his face. I haven’t yet been told that truism by my future father-in-law that parents tell other parents about how having kids make minutes feel like years and years feel like minutes, but these minutes in which I’m asserting my silence while watching the woman I love be interrogated dilate until they swallow the horizon. And then all at once she’s back in the car and the sheriff that took her tells us he’s letting us off with a warning and, I assume, by way of explanation, points to the road ahead and says it’s a known drug corridor. We speed off and for a few minutes Caitlin mumbles about how strange that all was, how strange his questions were, how they were all about me, how he asked if I was forcing her to do something she didn’t want to do, how he kept insisting she would be okay if she just told the truth. And then when she begins to realize what has just happened a silence fills the car, not an empty one, but the silence of rooms after suicides and we sit in it for those strange kind of minutes. And then as my mother is pulling her close for the first time I think that this afternoon’s violence has strangely done some of the work of love by closing some of the chasm between my reality and hers’.

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José Orduña is an essayist and short story writer. His first book, The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration and Displacement, published by Beacon Press, explores his experience as a Mexican immigrant living in the United States. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, The Nation, The New England Review and elsewhere.

Artwork by Michael Todd Cohen