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to karma. There was nothing more to be done, the light already playing tricks with her mind, carrying her like the current that had taken her from the beach, through realms of shadow and light, as if the sun were passing among clouds, though in point of fact, the sky was blameless and cobalt blue, reminding her of the desert, the orphanage in Mexicali, the Sisters of the Benediction . . .

    It had begun routinely enough—the night that had brought her to this apparent hallucination without end. She had taken a light meal on the deck of her apartment overlooking Las Playas then driven across town to the Mesa de Otay, where the residents of Colonia Vista Nueva were holding a candlelight vigil for a six-year-old child who had died of lead poisoning.
    The drive had taken her through the Zona del Río, past the new cultural center, the banks, and American-style shopping centerswith their fast-food franchises and decorative palms. As always, she had tried to imagine the place as it used to be, before Burger King and Ronald McDonald. The Scientologists said you had it in you to recall everything, clear to the womb if you did it right. Magdalena had spent the first two years of her life here. One might have thought she would have had more to remember now, inching her way through rush-hour traffic, caught among the absurd asphalt circles and bronze effigies that marked the Boulevard de Héroes. But as always, she came up short, which made her melancholy, filling her with nostalgia for a history beyond her reach—Cartolandia on the eve of destruction, the place of her birth.
    The Americans called it Cardboardland. It had been the first thing you saw, crossing the border—a shantytown of cardboard boxes, makeshift houses, and abandoned cars. Yet Cartolandia had its own employment center, its own food cooperative and health clinic. Its history was no less colorful than its appearance, born of subversion, often violent, its first incarnation an organized invasion by veterans of the Mexican Revolution, in protest of foreign-owned land and lack of jobs.
    The ensuing struggle for the Tijuana floodplain seesawed back and forth over the decades that followed. Eventually, however, a consortium of businessmen and politicians eager for development was successful in persuading the Mexican government to reclaim the land as a national resource, to label the residents as squatters, even though many had purchased their lots through the Ministry of Agriculture or paid rent to the local banks. Residents responded by staging protests, filing petitions. And then came an El Niño winter of particular ferocity and with it the rains. There were rumors in Cartolandia that the opposition was planning to open the floodgates of the Rodríguez Dam. Some residents fled, others stayed to fight. On the twenty-ninth of January, the government issued a statement denying the rumors. On the thirtieth of January, thefloodgates were opened. A hundred people drowned that night, Magdalena’s mother and grandmother among them. Magdalena was found at dawn, on a set of box springs with the family dog, and raised by the Sisters of the Benediction in Mexicali. She was lucky. The orphanage was a good one. The mother superior took a special interest in her, arranging for her to attend the Catholic grammar School in Calexico, orchestrating transportation, providing her with the gift of English, and yet a price had been exacted. For six years she’d been driven back and forth, across the border. There had been little chance for friendships with her classmates outside of the school. She came from another country in the company of nuns, and these made of her a curiosity, a child set apart. By the time she entered junior high school in Mexicali she’d been more proficient in English than in Spanish. By time she finished high school she was accomplished in both, a marketable skill. It made the other things possible. She now worked for an attorney in Tijuana while going to school