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Way” José, who became my oldest remaining friend—to la capital, that is, Ciudad Guate, where, eventually, we’d be sent on to relocation camps. I barely remember the Catholic orphanage because I escaped the first day, although it wasn’t much of an escape since I just walked out the door. I found my way across town to a much better-funded children’s hospital called AYUDA that was administered by the LDS, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or, as they don’t like to be called, the Mormons. There was a rumor they were sending kids from there to the U.S., which at the time I visualized as a garden of earthly delights with french-fry bushes and rivers of dry-ice-cold Squirt. There was a hugely tall woman with bright hair at the back door who hesitated for a minute and then, against regulations, let me in. I only saw her a couple times after that and didn’t learn her name, but I still think about her when I see that shade of chrome-yellow hair. Later, when I was listed as a probable orphan, they transferred me to something called the LDS Paradise Valley Plantation School, outside of town.

It took a long time for me to get any idea of what had happened to my family, and in fact I still don’t know. There wasn’t any one moment when I knew my parents were dead, just an endlessly swelling blob of revolting acceptance. Saturdays at the PVPS were free and relatives, if any, were allowed to visit with inmates in a back classroom, and every Saturday morning I’d borrow a math book from the upper grades and go in there and just lurk in the back in the cool hug of two pea-green cinder-block walls and a pea-green linoleum floor and just keep an eye on things. Nobody ever showed up trying to find me. La mara, the gang, made fun of me about it but I was already getting oblivious. I still have trouble with Saturdays, in fact; I get antsy and catch myself looking out the window a lot or rechecking my e-mail ten times an hour.

I was at PVPS for nearly two years before I got into their Native American Placement Program—which is partly a refugee-adoption foundation—and, just after my sixteenth tz’olk’in nameday, that is, when I was eleven, a family called the Ødegârds, with a little financial help from the Church, flew me to Utah.

To give the devils their due, the LDS actually do a lot of good things for Native Americans. For instance, they helped the Zuni win the biggest settlement against the U.S. government that any Indian nation has ever gotten. And they run all these charities all over Latin America, and this is all despite the fact that the Church was still officially white supremacist until 1978. They believe that some Native Americans—the light-skinned ones—are descendants of a Hebrew patriarch named Nephi, who’s a main character in the Book of Mormon. But who cares what their motives are, right? They looked after me and many others. I couldn’t believe how rich the Ødegârds were. Running water was one thing, but they even had an unlimited supply of angelitos , that is, marshmallows, in both the semisolid and the semiliquid forms. I kind of thought the U.S. had conquered us and I was a captive being raised in a luxurious prison in the imperial capital. It took a long time for me to learn that by U.S. standards they were lower middle class. I mean, these are people who say supper instead of dinner and even dinner instead of lunch, and who have a wall plaque in the kitchen with a recipe for “Baby Jesus’s Butter ’n’ Love Sugar Cookies,” with ingredients like “a dollop of understanding” and “a pinch of discipline.” And out there they’re considered intellectuals. So it’s taken some work for me to become the jaded sophisto I pretend to be today. Still, Mr. and Mrs. Ø were nice, or rather they wanted to be nice, but they had to put so much energy into retaining their delusions that there wasn’t a lot of time for each individual child. Also, my stepbrothers were