Mark Bonen has been away from his home country for seven years. Shy but determined, he works for months at a time on mining rigs in the desert, living in campers and jotting down fragments of poetry in a notebook. As an immigrant without a visa, Mark finds his life to be a series of temporary routines and relationships that seem insubstantial and surreal. During long, hot days at the rig, he often disappears into himself, alienated from the work and from his fellow laborers. “The papers would make him real,” observes the terse, third-person narration. “He wanted a life that didn’t have an expiry date.” The prize of Mark’s labor—a visa—is just over the horizon, promised to him by his contract with the mining company. So, Mark keeps working, despite his aching body, despite the solitude, and despite the tenuousness of his connection to each new place he finds himself. Nogia’s tightly written story features spare prose that perfectly situates the reader inside Mark’s grinding existence. The loneliness and boredom that the quiet, anxious protagonist experiences render the stakes of everyday interactions impossibly high: An attractive restaurant server, the first woman he’s seen in six months, mesmerizes him as she cleans his table; an aborted attempt to join a local salsa class becomes a symbol of his inability to connect. “Need to go with friends,” Mark thinks on his way to the class. “Don’t have any.” This novella is quiet and simple, but it’s never banal. Indeed, reminders of Mark’s immigration status drive home the fact that the details of his future, large and small, are in someone else’s hands, as when he watches helplessly as officials hash out the sponsorship of his visa over a series of blasé emails.
