Chapter 2
Chapter Two
The fourth-floor corridor lived in half-dark.
The department had a policy of replacing fluorescent tubes only after both bulbs in a given fixture had failed, so that every second fixture ran at half strength and the hallway had a dim, submerged quality that Elena had stopped reporting sometime back in the fall.
Reporting it had felt, after a while, like asking to be seen.
Her phone went off just as she got the key into the lock of her office door — three buzzes, a pause, then two more. Rosa could never once in her life let a call simply ring.
"I'm walking into my office," Elena said, instead of hello.
"Good, so you're free," Rosa said. There was a car door in the background, and wind, and the particular restless weather that lived permanently behind her sister's voice.
"Give me ninety seconds. How fast can a foreign mining outfit get a dig permit pushed through in Mexico when it absolutely, on every possible merit, should not get one? "
"Faster than it should." Elena got the door open.
The office met her with its usual smell of old paper and hot radiator dust. "The thing you have to understand is that it doesn't run through the federal level, not really.
It runs through the state secretariats. That's where the leverage is, and that's where it's cheap. "
"Define leverage for me."
"Money, mostly, but it's cleverer than a brown envelope.
" She dropped her bag on the desk. "The environmental impact study — the one that's legally supposed to stop them, the whole point of which is to be an obstacle — gets commissioned from a consultancy.
And more often than not it's a consultancy the same company keeps on retainer for other work.
So you've got a firm being paid by the applicant to assess whether the applicant should be allowed to proceed.
They grade their own homework, and somehow they always pass. "
"God. Say that again slower, I want it exactly."
"They grade their own homework." Elena sat down, and the chair complained the way it always did.
"And there's a mechanism on top of that, a word you'll want — consulta.
Community consultation. By law you have to ask the people who actually live on the land before you tear it up.
That's the protection. In practice, the consultation is a meeting held in a town two valleys over, badly advertised, at an inconvenient hour, and nobody who'd have objected finds out it happened until the minutes are already filed and stamped.
On paper the community was consulted. On paper everyone agreed. "
"And if the geology won't cooperate?" Rosa said. "Suppose there's an actual report that says, in plain words, do not dig here?"
"Then there are two reports. There's the first one, and there's the one they pay for afterward, and the second one is the one that gets attached to the file."
There was a small silence, and then the fast, precise clicking of Rosa taking notes on the other end.
"That's a hydrologist," Rosa said, half to herself. "That is exactly a hydrologist I'm looking at. He filed one assessment in March and a very different one in May, and in between the two of them he bought himself a truck."
"That would do it."
"So walk me through how it actually moves. Say the second report's written and it says the water's fine, dig away. Who signs off? Who's the last human being with a pen who could say no and doesn't?"
"That depends on the state, but usually it's someone in the state secretariat for the environment, at a level low enough to be affordable and high enough for the signature to count.
And they don't say no, because saying no isn't free for them either.
Saying no means a meeting with the company's lawyers, and a call from someone above them asking why they're getting in the way of investment and jobs, and a very long file to defend.
Saying yes means a stamp and a quiet afternoon.
You don't need to bribe a man to choose the quiet afternoon.
You just have to make the loud one expensive enough. "
"And nobody down the line catches it? The whole chain just holds?"
"The whole chain is designed to hold. That's the elegant part, if you can stand to admire it.
No single person does anything you could put in a headline.
The consultancy writes an honest-looking report using the company's numbers.
The community gets consulted in a way that technically happened.
The official signs a document that looks complete because on paper it is complete.
Every link is deniable on its own. You only see the shape of it if you lay all of them down side by side, and almost nobody ever gets to lay all of them down side by side.
That's usually where a story like yours dies — not because it isn't true, but because no one person can hold the whole thing in one hand at once. "
"I can," Rosa said. "That's the job."
"I know. That's why I answer when it's you."
"That's all you get out of me until it's real, so don't push. But say the homework line one more time, I'm going to steal it outright."
"You're welcome to it. I'm not using it for anything."
"You should be, that's the whole problem.
" A car horn went by somewhere behind her, and then the wind cut out abruptly as Rosa got into the car and pulled the door shut.
When she came back her voice had dropped into a different register, the low and level one she kept for things she'd already decided she was going to say whether or not she'd been invited to.
"You're good at this. You know you're good at this. "
"I'm good at it for eleven undergraduates," Elena said, "three of whom are awake at any given moment, and none of whom will remember a word of it by June."
"Then come and do it somewhere people can see you do it."
"Goodbye, Rosa."
"Don't you dare hang up on me. I mean it." A breath. "Can I ask you something, and you don't get to do the thing where you deflect it into a joke and then we're somehow talking about my life instead of yours?"
"You'll ask either way," Elena said. "You always do."
"How long are you planning to stay down there?"
"Down where?"
"In the hole, Ellie. You found a hole in the floor, and you climbed down into it, and you pulled the lid closed over your head, and now you're going to sit there and tell me the light's perfectly fine down there, thank you, no notes."
"The light's fine," Elena said.
Rosa didn't laugh, which she almost always did, even at the bad ones.
"You used to pull at every loose thread you ever came across.
Every single one. At dinner. At funerals.
In the car until somebody actually threatened to leave you on the shoulder of the highway and drive off — you remember that, you were maybe nineteen.
Somebody would say one wrong thing and you'd have your fingers in it, unpicking, right there over the tamales.
And now somebody hands you a thread, hands it straight to you, and you put your hands in your pockets and tell them very calmly that it isn't worth the trouble. "
Elena sat back, and the chair complained again, more loudly. "Some things are buried because they should stay buried, Rosa. That's a real category. It exists. Not every loose thread is worth what it costs you to pull it out, and I've done the arithmetic on a few of them now."
"That's a very reasonable thing to say," Rosa said, "for a person who got badly burned pulling exactly one."
"Or for a person who learned something from it."
"Or for a person who decided that one bad outcome was a law of physics and organized her entire life around never testing it again.
" Rosa let that sit, which wasn't like her at all — she usually crowded her own silences, filled them before anyone could get in — and this one she left open.
Then, more quietly, she went into the Spanish they only ever reached for when they'd used up all their edges on each other. "Lo que se entierra se pudre, Ellie."
Buried things rot. Their grandmother's line, delivered exactly the way the old woman used to deliver it, with no mercy anywhere in it and no offer of any.
"Come home in June," Rosa said, back in English.
"Mamá keeps handing me your excuses to relay up the chain, and I'm tired of being your defense attorney, I didn't sign up for it.
And answer your phone more than once a quarter, please.
The silence is genuinely starting to scare me. That part I'm not joking about."
"I'll think about June."
"You'll think about it the exact way you think about everything now, which is not at all." The engine turned over under her voice. "I love you. Go pull a thread. Any thread. Pick a small one to start."
The line went dead before Elena could decide whether she was going to answer any of it, and she sat there a moment with the dark phone in her hand, turning it once, and then she set it down on the desk face-up and left it alone.