Who is Hidden

Héctor slides his notebook across the table. 

In pencil, he has carefully written a list of English words to ask about—words he has encountered since last time we talked. 

haunt

creep

lavish

unfazed

riot

crawl

strain

The list continues across two pages, catalogued in his earnest script. Walk-in learners get only 20 minutes at a time. Héctor comes prepared.  

I have never seen Héctor’s entire face. Over time, my mind has arranged the pieces I’ve caught into a kind of composite; a placeholder for the personality beneath. 

At first sight, Héctor looked like a caricature of someone in witness protection: sauntering to my table from the center’s waiting area, Dodgers hat pulled low, eyes behind full-tint wayfarers, a powder-blue surgical mask over his nose and mouth. Hints of acne scarring peeking out above.

He is slight and wiry, and wears the same black hoodie, zipped up. He calls me, unfailingly, ‘bro.’

“What’s up, bro,” in his low drawl, signing in with a tiny golf pencil, the only implement we are allowed to give. Often Héctor is in the office before I am, waiting.

I don’t know what his life looks like outside the library, or how he comes to collide with these lively words. I know that he came—when he did—from Guatemala. He speaks English well; he told me, when we first met, that he learned in church. 

Héctor’s curiosity is combustible. I have learned this, over the months. It reaches out in every direction. Behind eyes I’ve never seen, inside Héctor’s mind, one imagines a kind of spark, a pilot light, alive, ready to move outward, to feed on what it’s given. 

Early on, he would bring a book of children’s poetry to read aloud from, valuing the variety and playfulness of verbiage. He enjoyed discussing distinctions between words. 

“‘It fell, with a ‘thud.’’ What is ‘thud,’ bro?” 

I tell him that a ‘thud’ is a sound, the dull sound of something bumping something else. I drop my half-filled water bottle onto the carpet. That’s a thud. 

He drops his tiny golf pencil. “And that?” 

That is too quiet to be ‘thud,’ I tell him. 

He writes this down.

“What is too loud, to be ‘thud’, bro?” 

Héctor’s questions pull me to some forgotten side of myself. I think about them for days. To answer them often requires a kind of full-body pageantry, a digging up of cultural symbols, from us both. I find myself laughing. 

“What is ‘boasting,’ bro?” 

It’s like bragging. 

“What is bragging, bro?” 

I will know Héctor is satisfied when he leans back and shakes his pencil and says “Ohhhh, arightaright,” making a note for himself. Until this happens, the questions continue.

A line of poetry, describing animals, uses the word “hoppers.” 

“What is hoppers, bro?” 

Hopping is like a small jump. I say. Frogs hop. 

“Only frogs, bro?” he says, skeptically. 

Once, a student from Taiwan—‘Jack’—was finishing as Héctor was coming in. Jack had drawn some intricate Mandarin characters on a piece of scrap paper, to show me his native written language. I knew to call Héctor over. 

“Come see this,” I said. He walked over, face completely covered, his curiosity visible in his movement. He leaned both hands on the table as I explained.  

“Whaaat.” A pause. “This is your language, bro? You can read this?” he said. Jack, smiling, nodded.

Hector sat down with his pencil, trying to copy the characters exactly, down to the tiniest detail. Jack waited, touched. 

“Is it like that?” Héctor said, dropping the final consonant ’t’ sound, holding the image up to Jack, who nodded. 

“You can read that?” again dropping the ’t,’ Jack again nodding, pleased, again touched. I could not see Héctor’s face, but I imagined it. 

Sometimes his gaze would land on nearby magazines, like one with an image of a woman playing baseball on the cover. “Women play baseball, bro?” he asked. I told him that this particular image was from World War II. 

“Can we talk about that?” he said. 

We talked about the war, the countries involved, the US and Russia having fought on the same side, the US dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. 

We talked about baseball. Héctor at one point pausing to carefully add “Ted Williams” to his list.

I have not seen Héctor since June, when the ICE raids escalated in Los Angeles. I remained hopeful for a few weeks, watching the center’s door in case he ambled in, holding some strange book or other, wanting to talk, to see or hear something new. I will never know, for sure, where he’s gone. 

On bad days, I imagine him walking to the library, backpack over his shoulder. I imagine the creep of the tinted van, the masked men hidden within.

I imagine, on bad days, the detention centers, hours away in the Mojave, where migrants are hauled, shuffling, to sleep on concrete floors, crammed head-to-toe into sweltering rooms, feces overflowing from the toilets. Guards mocking the prisoners’ requests to let them clean things themselves. I wonder where Héctor’s gaze would land, in such a place. 

I remember the Guatemalan migrant children recently woken in the middle of the night to be told they’d be returned to Guatemala. One spontaneously vomiting out of fear, another considering, aloud, committing suicide. 

I imagine Héctor on the blazing downtown street, anticipating the cool air at the library’s entrance, hat pulled low, heavy scarring visible on his sun-browned hands. Moving towards some good new thing. 

I imagine him through the eyes of those hidden men, who must collect 3,000 migrants a day. An insatiable list. 

Héctor, who wondered what was louder than ‘thud,’ who wondered what it meant to creep, to haunt, to crawl, to strain. Who brought himself to us, through the maze and the heat, again and again, to share in it all. 

I think of his pencil falling to the carpeted floor, bouncing lightly, too soft to be thud, making hardly a sound.