Sergio Miguel Aveskamp

The Second Twin

Sergio Miguel Aveskamp was born at 03:52 on the morning of 22 March 1991 at St Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe, New Mexico, eleven minutes after his twin brother, Christophorus Johan Aveskamp. The delivery was long and the second birth more difficult than the first; Sergio arrived blue and silent, was briefly taken from the room, and returned an hour later in full voice. His mother liked to say that he had spent the rest of his life making up for those eleven minutes.

His father, Thomas Willem Aveskamp, born on 9 June 1959, was a field geologist with the New Mexico Bureau of Geology, the grandson of Dutch immigrants who had farmed in Iowa before drifting south-west. He was a patient, literal man who spent weeks at a time in the Jemez Mountains and the Rio Grande rift, and who came home with rocks in his pockets and very little to say about anything else. His mother, Marisol Aveskamp (née Ramirez), born on 14 February 1963, taught at a primary school on the city's south side and belonged to a large Hispano family whose roots in northern New Mexico ran back further than anyone could trace.

The family lived in a low adobe house in the Casa Solana neighbourhood, with a cottonwood in the yard and a kitchen that was rarely empty. The twins were the couple's only children. From the beginning they were very different. Christophorus was quiet, absorbed, and happiest building things with his hands. Sergio was loud, sociable, and happiest at the centre of a room, organising whatever was happening in it.

Fiestas and Cousins

The Ramirez side of the family provided most of Sergio's education in how people gathered. His grandmother, Dolores Ramirez, hosted Sunday lunches for anywhere between twelve and forty relatives, and by the age of eight Sergio had appointed himself her deputy—seating aunts away from the uncles they were feuding with, sending cousins on errands, and rearranging tables when more people arrived than expected. Dolores found him useful and indulged him. Thomas found the whole business baffling and usually retreated to the yard.

Every September the family went to the burning of Zozobra, the giant effigy of gloom set alight at the start of the Fiestas de Santa Fe. Sergio loved it with a passion that puzzled his brother: the crowd, the drums, the moment when tens of thousands of people fell silent and then roared as the fire caught. He would later say that it was the first time he understood that a crowd could feel one thing at once, and that someone, somewhere, had planned for it to happen.

The twins were close as small children and drifted apart in adolescence, as twins often do. Christophorus spent his weekends on his father's field trips and building treehouses in the yard; Sergio spent his in the kitchen with his mother, at his grandmother's table, or at the school's drama club, where he discovered that he preferred running the stage to standing on it. They shared a bedroom until they were twelve and fought about it constantly.

Telling the Truth

Sergio came out to his family in the spring of 2008, a few weeks after his seventeenth birthday, in the kitchen, before he had decided he was going to. Marisol, who went to Mass every Sunday and had a framed Our Lady of Guadalupe above the stove, cried and then held him and then did not speak about it for three months. Thomas listened, nodded, and said that he had wondered. The extended family learned in pieces, and some of them responded better than others.

The reception was harder than Sergio had hoped and gentler than he had feared. What he did not understand at the time was its effect on his brother. Christophorus had been wrestling with the same truth about himself, and watching Marisol's silence settled him, for most of the following decade, into keeping it hidden. Sergio did not learn of this until many years later, in Bixbus, and when he did he found it difficult to forgive himself for not having noticed.

He graduated from Santa Fe High School in 2009 with average grades, a reputation for organising every dance and fundraiser the school had held in his final two years, and a determination to leave New Mexico as quickly as possible. Christophorus went south to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Sergio went north.

Boulder and the Strip

Between 2009 and 2013 Sergio studied business at the University of Colorado in Boulder, concentrating on hospitality and event management. He was an indifferent student in accounting and an excellent one in anything that involved people, and he spent much of his time working banquet shifts at a hotel on Canyon Boulevard to pay his rent. Boulder gave him his first experience of living openly without explanation, and he made the most of it. He also, for the first time, began to drink more than was good for him.

After graduating in 2013, he took a position as a banquet and events coordinator at the Mirage in Las Vegas. It was the job he had wanted, and it nearly broke him. The hours were brutal, the events enormous, and the culture around them built on stamina, alcohol, and the assumption that nobody slept. He was good at it—quick, unflappable in a crisis, and gifted at calming a furious client—and he was promoted twice in eighteen months. By the end of 2014 he was exhausted, drinking most nights, and in a relationship with a croupier named Daniel Ortega that was conducted almost entirely after three in the morning.

He left Las Vegas in the summer of 2015, ended the relationship by text message from the Interstate, and was ashamed of that for years afterwards.

Other People's Parties

In Los Angeles Sergio joined Pacific Coast Luxury Events, a firm that staged weddings, launches, and private parties for clients who measured success in square metres of imported flowers. Between 2015 and 2018 he rose to senior coordinator and managed events for film producers, technology executives, and minor celebrities, several of whom he liked and most of whom he did not. He lived in a small apartment in Silver Lake, cut back on his drinking, and became, by his own later account, extremely good at a job that meant almost nothing to him.

The restlessness that followed was not dramatic. He changed apartments twice, began and ended several relationships that never quite took hold, and talked repeatedly about going back to school, opening a restaurant, or moving abroad, without doing any of them. He visited Santa Fe at Christmas and for the Fiestas, sat at his grandmother's table, and noticed, on the Christmases when his brother came home from the Netherlands, that he seemed more closed each year. Dolores died in January 2017 at the age of eighty-one. Sergio organised the funeral reception because nobody else could face it, and it was the best event he had run in years.

In late 2018 Christophorus, by then working as a restoration joiner in the Netherlands, told the family that he had taken a finishing contract with Killerton Enterprises on a large residential development at a remote site, that the money was very good, and that he would be out of contact for long stretches. He crossed on 2 February 2019. Sergio, who had barely spoken to his brother in months, was surprised by how much the news unsettled him.

The Persuasion

The messages that reached Los Angeles from Christophorus over the following days were short, odd, and evasive about where exactly he was. Sergio's replies grew more insistent. By the end of February 2019 his brother had told him the truth, or as much of it as he could put into words, and had asked him to come. The settlement needed people who could manage accommodation, supplies, and the daily logistics of feeding and housing several hundred tradespeople, and Christophorus had put his brother's name forward without asking him first.

Sergio took three weeks to decide. He told his parents he had accepted an overseas contract in hospitality logistics, which was true in every particular except the ones that mattered. He did not tell them that he would never be coming back. Marisol made him promise to write. Thomas shook his hand at the door, then embraced him, which he had not done since the twins were children. Sergio crossed into Bixbus in March 2019.

The first months were the worst of his life. Bixbus had no hotels, no venues, no clients, and no use for a man whose skills lay in table plans and floral budgets. He was assigned to the crews' commissary and the stores, where he counted tins, rationed coffee, and dealt with complaints about both. He was hot, homesick, and frightened, and for a time he was drinking again from whatever supplies he could find. He and Christophorus argued bitterly about what he had been told and when, above all how plainly his brother had explained that there would be no going back, and for several weeks they did not speak.

Finding the Work

What changed things was the arrivals. New workers, and increasingly their families, were coming through every week, and Sergio watched them stumble into the settlement with nobody to meet them, nowhere obvious to sleep, and no one to explain what had happened to them. They were met, if at all, by whoever happened to be free. He began meeting them himself, on his own time at first and then as part of his duties, after he talked the stores manager into letting him run the allocation of beds and rations to new arrivals.

By the middle of 2019 he had become, without any formal title, the person in the settlement who knew where everybody was sleeping. He kept the lists in a ruled notebook, then in a spreadsheet on a battered laptop, and later in a filing system that he defended against all reform. He was good at it in the same way he had been good at the Mirage: calm when others were not, quick to find a bed or a meal or a person who spoke the right language.

He attended the settlement's first Founders' Day on 23 July 2019 as one of the volunteers who carried tables and found chairs, and it was there that he first worked alongside Lisa Smith, the event planner from Salt Lake City who had organised it. They recognised each other immediately as people from the same trade. By the end of the evening they were arguing about crowd flow at the communal meal, and by the end of the month they were friends.

In the autumn of 2019 Sergio collapsed from heat exhaustion while unloading a supply delivery and was treated by Damien Russo, a medic who had come through to support the construction crews. Damien was dry, unhurried, and unimpressed by Sergio's attempts to charm him, and told him plainly that he was drinking too much and sleeping too little. Sergio went back three times with minor complaints before Damien asked whether he intended to keep inventing injuries or would rather simply have dinner.

A Door for the Newcomers

Through 2020 Sergio worked closely with the newly formed Bixbus Event Collective, lending his logistical experience to its first festival in July and handling the food, water, and crowd arrangements that Lisa and Leena Heikki had neither the time nor the inclination to manage. He enjoyed the work more than anything he had done since arriving. He also noticed, standing at the edge of the festival crowds, how many faces he did not recognise, and how many of the newest arrivals stood apart from the celebrations as though unsure they were invited.

The conversations that followed between him and Lisa stretched through the second half of 2020. Sergio's argument was blunt: the settlement threw parties for people who had survived a year in Bixbus and did almost nothing for people who had arrived the day before. Lisa's was more expansive: that belonging could be built deliberately, and that a shared meal or a lit lantern did more to settle a frightened newcomer than any housing form. Each regarded the other's view as half right.

The Bixbus Welcome Centre opened in March 2021 in a repurposed warehouse near the main plaza, with Sergio as its co-founder and director and Lisa as its co-founder and community director. The division of labour reflected their strengths. Sergio ran the operation—intake, housing assistance, employment placement, the endless lists—while Lisa built the orientation programmes, the welcome meals, and the events that drew newcomers into the life of the settlement. Rebecca Baker joined later that year and quickly became the person who actually knew how the Centre's systems worked.

The first year was chaotic. The warehouse leaked in the rare rains and baked through the long summer, and the Centre was perpetually short of beds, translators, and staff. Sergio worked fourteen-hour days and quarrelled with half the settlement's institutions over housing allocations. He also stopped drinking, in the spring of 2021, after a night he did not discuss with anyone except Damien.

Damien and the Brothers

Sergio and Damien became a couple in 2021, after nearly two years of a relationship that both of them had refused to name. They moved into a small apartment together later that year. Damien's steadiness suited him; Sergio's warmth drew Damien out in company in ways his colleagues found astonishing. They argued about Sergio's hours and Damien's silences, and agreed on almost everything else.

His relationship with Christophorus changed more slowly. The brothers had reconciled within months of Sergio's arrival, but it was only in 2020, when Christophorus met André Villeneuve, a French-Canadian botanist, that Sergio learned how long his twin had been hiding and why. The conversation took place over most of a night. Sergio apologised for things he had not known he had done, and Christophorus told him, with some impatience, that none of it had been his fault. They were closer afterwards than they had been since they shared a bedroom.

Messages from Santa Fe arrived irregularly. Marisol wrote long letters about the school, the cousins, and the parish, and asked carefully worded questions about Damien that Sergio answered as fully as he could. Thomas added a line or two at the end of each, usually about the weather or a rock he had found. When Sergio told them about Damien, Marisol's reply took longer than usual to come and was warmer than he had expected.

Isla

In 2022 Sergio established a volunteer network through the Welcome Centre, recruiting settlers who had arrived in earlier years to meet, guide, and house the new ones. It became one of the Centre's most effective programmes and one of its most difficult to manage, and it brought him into contact with every kind of arrival the settlement received—including, increasingly, children who had come through alone or lost the adults who had brought them.

In 2023 Sergio and Damien adopted Isla, a girl of two whose parents had both died within weeks of arriving in Bixbus. She came to the Welcome Centre in the arms of a volunteer and stayed in its temporary care for a month while the Centre searched for relatives who did not exist. Sergio did not intend to become her father. Damien, who had treated her on intake, decided first and told Sergio afterwards. The adoption was completed that summer. In the same year Christophorus and André adopted their son, Lucas, and the twins became fathers within months of each other, each claiming the other had copied him.

Fatherhood came less easily to Sergio than he had expected. Isla was wary, slow to trust, and attached first to Damien, and Sergio, who was used to winning people over, found it painful to be held at arm's length by a toddler. He learned patience from her. By the end of the year she was following him around the apartment, and by the following spring she was calling him Papá in the way his own mother had called her father.

The Plaza

The Welcome Centre outgrew its warehouse long before it could leave it. By 2023 it was handling arrivals in numbers that the original building had never been designed to hold, and Sergio had spent the better part of two years lobbying for permanent premises. When construction began on Unity Plaza in January 2023, he secured space in its South Commercial Wing.

He was not willing to wait for the wing to be finished. On 2 October 2023 the Centre moved into a completed ground-floor section while the rest of the building was still under construction around it. For ten weeks staff and newcomers worked through dust, drilling, and the regular loss of power, and Rebecca Baker kept a tally on the office wall of the number of times the lights had gone out. The wing was finished on 15 December 2023. Sergio celebrated by sleeping for most of the following day.

Arrivals Without End

From 2024 the character of the Centre's work changed. As settlements elsewhere in Clivilius failed, displaced people began arriving in Bixbus in growing numbers, often with nothing and sometimes with injuries that Damien and his colleagues were called in to treat. Sergio built the Centre's refugee resettlement programme largely around them. It was the work he was proudest of and the work that cost him most. He heard more stories of loss in a single month than in his whole life on Earth, and some of them followed him home.

Lisa, by then married to Tom Kendrick, saw her family grow in the same years, with the birth of her daughter Ivy in March 2024 and her son Oliver in January 2026, and more of the Centre's direction fell to Sergio as a result. He did not resent it, though he sometimes missed her ideas more than he said. The two of them still argued about whether the Centre's first duty was to house people or to welcome them. Neither of them ever conceded the point.

By 2025 the Welcome Centre had processed tens of thousands of arrivals, and its staff numbered in the hundreds. Sergio, at thirty-four, had become one of the more recognisable figures in Bixbus's civic life—known to councillors, housing officials, and a great many former newcomers who stopped him in the street to tell him where they were living now. He found the recognition embarrassing and enjoyed it more than he admitted.

By 2026 he lived with Damien and Isla in an apartment a short walk from Unity Plaza, ate with his brother's family most Sundays, and organised those Sunday meals with the same attention his grandmother had once given hers. He still wrote to his parents, who were by then in their sixties and had come to understand, in their own terms, where both their sons had gone and that neither would be coming home. And on the busiest intake days, when the queue at the Centre ran out of the door and into the plaza, he still went down from his office to the front desk, found the most frightened face in the line, and asked them where they had come from.