Free The Weight of Shadows by José Orduña

I’m supposed to write on any given line. Usually there isn’t enough space to include what my mother tells me my name is: José Martín Orduña Gonzalez.
    I do know that the inconsistencies have prevented me from boarding airplanes. The sight of a bearded brown man speaking English too perfectly, with a driver’s license that reads JOSE M ORDUNA, a green Mexican passport that reads JOSÉ MARTIN ORDUÑA GONZALEZ, and a boarding pass that reads JOSE MARTIN ORDUNA is enough to cause some trouble.
    The very top of the valentine reads “Department of Homeland Security.” Underneath that: “US Citizenship and Immigration Services.” Below that, “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” stretches the width of the pagein the proprietary font found on US currency. The fat letters sit heavily and seem immovable and permanent, just like the idea of money itself. The page even seems to be made of a similar material as dollar bills. It’s some kind of counterfeit-proof paper with different colored fibers worked into the page. It immediately communicates its authority, an authority it has granted itself through force and violence, and it strikes me how such a strong signal can be communicated on something as insubstantial as a single sheet of paper.
    In the middle of the page, the arm of Lady Liberty ghosts behind the words “ALIEN,” “CENTER,” and “ABANDONED.” There is a reminder to bring my Alien Registration Card.
    When I was ten my dad gave me my first wallet—it was green, with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the outside. Then he handed me my identification card, my first green card, which was actually pink. He said we’d gotten it when we’d gone to Juárez but that he didn’t think I was ready to carry it then. I remembered we’d gone very suddenly and that I missed my third-grade class trip to an amusement park, that a man I’d never seen showed up at our door in Chicago, and that my dad let him into our house. The next day we were on a Greyhound bus that took three days to get to El Paso, Texas, and then we immediately took a cab across a bridge into Juárez. We stayed in a strip mall motel where the television in the next room played straight through the night. I remember lying awake with my eyes open, watching my dad go to the window to peer out through the blinds several times and also going to the door to stand silently in the darkness listening. He got up at four o’clock to hold a place in a line across the road, and later that morning I watched my mom fix me breakfast with a mini cereal box that was on the dresser, powdered milk she’d gotten at a gas station, and a bottle of water. I remember being enthralled by the powdered milk.
    At age ten I looked at my new card. Just above my three-quarter-anglebust was a term I hadn’t known: “RESIDENT ALIEN.”
    â€œHa,” I laughed. “I’m an alien.”
    I remember my dad staring back at me with a grim look, the one he used to shoot me when he needed me to know something serious was happening. I remember him telling me I was a man now, despite my crooked flattop and wiry frame.
    â€œA man never leaves home without his wallet.”
    Then he asked if I remembered Jorge.
    â€œWho?”
    â€œJorge, the fat guy with a limp that used to work with me at the hotel.”
    Yes. I’d seen him hobbling around after a soccer ball at one of the rare social gatherings my father had time off work for.
    â€œJorge didn’t have his green card with him.”
    I’d gotten distracted by Michelangelo’s orange mask, so he gently raised my head with his fingers.
    â€œHe’s gone now.”
    I didn’t really understand. I’d never really understood what it meant that we lived in Chicago but had come from Mexico because it was never explained to me in explicit terms. Like most children I took things as they came, assimilating almost