Racial Immanence. Marissa K. López

is intended. Mickey reads this difference as an absence of meaning, but the narrator suggests that a deep significance lies in the novel’s linguistic slippages, a point Butch makes when he tells Mickey, “It’s not lo que dice [what you say], bro. It’s how” (52).

      With Butch the novel challenges Mickey to find significance in meaning’s present absence. Mail, like meaning in Last Known Residence, is also present in its absence. Mickey waits for the mail to deliver what he describes to Fred, the YMCA desk clerk, as a “check with a bunch of zeros,” an indeterminate indicator of either a lot, or very little (89). Other YMCA residents anxiously await their mail, one character is fired on suspicion of tampering with it, and another, Charles Townsend, collects mail from the trash and organizes it into dated bundles (202). Charles is unique amidst all the narrative attention to mail’s absence in that he makes the mail visible in his attempts to organize it chronologically. The narrator suggests that Charles’s efforts are in vain, however, when Mickey discovers the bundles in Charles’s room along with a .22-caliber pistol (202). Mr. Fuller, the YMCA manager, is later shot with a .22. Charles owns the gun, but Mickey has access to it, and the reader never learns for certain the identity of the culprit. Charles’s abstract chronologies yield to the finality of the gun and death, from which no meaning can be drawn. Fuller’s story has no resolution; the identity of his murderer is less significant than the fact of his death, just as the content of the mail is less significant than that it reach its destination.

      The gun and the mail matter, but they do not mean anything. Mickey cannot tell a story about them, and so ideas about free will and sense certainty take center stage here in this moment of Mickey’s narrative failure. For example, the scene of Fuller’s murder is not described in the novel, but we read of Mickey’s physical reaction to Fuller’s death before we learn he has died: “It had happened.… And he was still alive. This he was absolutely sure of. He could hear his breath and heart beating. This was true. There was a strangeness in this sensation of life, a joy that ached like sadness” (212). Fuller’s death shifts “truth” from knowing to being, from cognition to the sensual experience of the breathing, beating bodies.

      Before Fuller’s death, however, Mickey agonizes over what he can and cannot know, as well as whether he or some higher power is determining his actions. Mickey’s anxiety is only heightened when Mária, who has been fired for allegedly tampering with the mail, tells him, “I didn’t touch the mail, never,” and reminds him, “Nothing is unintentional” (102). Earlier, Mária suggests that there is no intention but God’s (83), but her double negative in this instance throws a shadow of doubt over such claims: if she did not never touch the mail, then perhaps she did touch the mail. God’s intention may supersede Mária’s, yet her choice of words reveals the possibility of her own, human intention. Logical puzzles such as this question about intention throw Mickey into a tailspin of doubt. But with Fuller’s death, the human body emerges as will and vitiates Mickey’s need to know. Mickey comes to the conclusion that his knowledge and choices do not matter: there is no such thing as a truth that stands outside the self’s will to believe.

      Mickey’s choice of belief over knowledge is best understood in the context of philosophical debates over the nature and existence of free will. Throughout Last Known Residence, Mickey wonders why he is doing what he is doing, whether he is writing his own story or playing a part in a story that has already happened, whether he is, in short, acting of his own free will. Philosophy offers essentially two ways to consider Mickey’s problem: his actions are predetermined or they are not; there is either order or chaos in the universe. On the side of order we have Benjamin Libet, who found that our bodies move and react to things before our brains begin processing relevant information, suggesting that the human capacity for rational thought has little bearing on what we do: our actions are predetermined through bioscience; there is no free will.14 Libet straddles this fine line, though, arguing that free will resides in our capacity to veto undesirable actions. The more robust counter to such hard determinism points to the random catalytic action between agents. The course of particles through space and time might be predetermined but there is always that unexpected swerve, that coming together of forces producing something new that Merleau-Ponty referred to as folds in the flesh of nature.15 This fold, or swerve, opens a space for human intention, like Mickey’s belief or Mária’s possibly touching the mail, and grounds the potentiality of free will.

      Still the question remains: how do we exercise the will to control our actions in the moment of the fold? Can we be morally responsible actors? For Mickey this question is moot. Culpability for Fuller’s death is unresolved; Mickey embraces the swerve, embraces the chances he embodies, and the novel closes with him wandering off into indeterminate border space. That conclusion reinforces the novel’s larger argument that Mickey must learn to act on what he feels and not be incapacitated by his inability to know (just as the reader must forge on even though significant plot points are never resolved). For example, Mickey doubts Sarge’s friend Philip’s story about a local Mexican restaurant that has different menus for its Mexican and Anglo customers (67). Philip’s lack of evidence, coupled with Mickey’s inability to be precise about what evidence he would accept, prove to Mickey that the story is not true. But there is an element of truth in Philip’s story that cannot be pinned down textually. Though Philip may have invented the story about the menus, racism is still an undeniable fact in El Paso: a force radiating from the lived experience of the brown, Mexican body. In the same way that the novel implies the insignificance or unknowability of truths such as Fuller’s killer and the fate of the mail, here the novel suggests that Philip’s invention of this story is more significant than its truth.

      Race is immanent in the menu story: to believe Philip is to understand that race matters even if Mickey cannot know what it means. When Mickey recognizes that “you do have to decide,” eventually, what will be true, he begins to perceive the experiential belief that resides in the body. Mickey eventually associates Mária’s “nothing is unintentional” with the meaninglessness of the universe as he walks through the desert and comes to see the sky, the moon, and the earth as an encompassing emptiness. “Right then, he’d say, he decided” (196). This sense of emptiness, rather than evidential proof, helps him decide against hard determinism in favor of chaos. He begins to believe that he can make intentional decisions, though the reader never learns exactly what he decides.

      Mickey is as in the dark as the reader as he moves into his uncertain future. He is certain, however, in his refusal to be tied to a past he cannot remember, to be a character in someone else’s story. Ethnicity exemplifies just such a performance and so Mickey refuses this too, rejecting Chicanx identity as performed by Sarge and Omar, two fellow Chicanx residents at the YMCA. Omar, a “mixed metaphor” of defiant chicanidad (86), stands in opposition to Sarge’s espousal of “American” values (35). Mickey is suspicious of both models of chicanismo as performances beholden to a higher authority of meaning. Omar and Sarge want to pin down the self, to make their racialized bodies mean something, while Mickey wants to let his sense certainty evolve into a future of its own mattering. For Mickey, identity becomes a process of historical and temporal negotiation. That is, history is significant, but the self cannot be overdetermined by it; history matters, but it doesn’t mean anything. Mitchum Huehls has written on this paradox, noting that historical “content is irrelevant for producing meaning and grounding identity” in the novel while “the purely formal fact of past-ness” underlines the “foundationally temporal truth” of Mickey’s life: that history is always a present absence, always past, always lost (Huehls, Qualified Hope 184). History is not a problem of knowledge for Gilb, according to Huehls, but rather an existential mode.

      To illustrate, Mickey refers to “loop[s] in time” (2) or “location[s] in time” (74), which suggest that time is both nonlinear and spatial for him, an idea reflected in his anxiety over his story’s conclusion and his feeling that he is actually reliving past events. To resolve this anxiety, he must, as the novel progresses, move away from a conception of time as space, as progression, to time as sense, toward Bergson’s duration, or toward the unknowable temporality of the Sun Stone. Mickey intuits this in his argument with Sarge about Mexican politics. Sarge sees Mexico’s problems as stemming from an inability to progress historically, while Mickey views history less as progress and more as process (45). When one of the imaginary commentators in Mickey’s head declares, “Not