I Dream of a Mexican Visa
One doesn't actually need a visa to spend 180 days in Mexico
Mrs. Mendelsohn (she prefers the legal spelling) and I had barely stepped across the border when a trio of what I originally mistook for young Mormons converged on us, grinning luminously and exuding puppyishness. But these — Kim, Chris, and Pat, according to their name tags — were no religious zealots. They were there to make our visit to Mexico smooth and pleasant in any way they could. Their caps said, Welcome to Mexico!, with an explanation point, and their T-shirts asserted, “We’re here to help!” (also with an explanation point), above the Department of the Interior’s bison-dominated logo.
“It’s interesting that all three of you have non-binary names,” Mrs. Mendelsohn mused. They tittered obligingly, as though amused. “Oh,” laughed Pat, “you don’t need to worry about any of us being gender-dysmorphic.” Her two sidekicks tittered affirmatively.
“What is it we allegedly need help with?” I wondered.
“With your paperwork,” Chris said, as happily as a middle school student whose algebra teacher has just posed a question to which he alone knew the answer. “You know, your visa, and everything.”
“The first thing we need to do is get your photos,” Kim, the most earnest of the three said. “Please follow me.”
Mrs. Mendelsohn and I looked at each other and shrugged. These attractive young people seemed to know what they doing, and had official-looking T-shirts, so we did indeed follow, into a little photo studio in which an indigenous-looking young man who reminded me of my one-time English as a Second Language student Isaí was reading a copy of A Thousand Years of Solitude that had clearly passed through a great many hand over the years. He put the book down immediately and, grinning no less luminously than our three Good Samaritans, remarked on our facial features as he photographed us, complimenting Mrs. Mendelsohn on the prettiness of her hazel eyes, and telling me that he’d never seen a nose shaped quite like mine. “Neither have I,” I chuckled, trying to hide my anguish.
Kim provided each of us with a clipboard to which was attached a questionnaire designed to elicit the information required on our visas. Once having filled them out, we were ushered into an SUV whose make I didn’t determine. I am able to say with confidence that it was not a Cadillac Escalope, or whatever it’s called. Not nearly as spacious, you see. A real estate agent drove me and Mrs. Mendelsohn around Milwaukee (you can’t make this stuff up!) in one of those in 2008, and it was like riding around in someone’s living room, which of course has nothing to do with the present narrative.
To hasten back to which, for reasons not clear to me, the SUV drove onto a ferry, which not half a nautical mile out of port was capsized by a tsunami much like the one featured in that Norwegian three-part drama we saw on Netflix last week, the one in which the entire gorgeous blond family, even little Spectrumboy, survived in spite of overwhelming odds.
It occurred to me with a jolt that pipr three puppies hadn’t been looking after us out of the goodness of their hearts, and I asked one of them (I was seated behind him, and couldn’t see his name tag) how much their help was going to cost us. I was hoping he’d laugh and assure me that the Department of the Interior provided the service free, though the interior was a foreign country’s, but no such luck. “All in, with the photographs and everything, $220,” he said, “each.” Furious because we hadn’t been advised that there would be any charge, let alone a hefty one, I began trying to strangle him. His two accomplices saved him, and I awoke from my penultimate dream of 2024.
