How to Read the Air (3 page)

Without ever thinking about it, I had become one of those men who increasingly spent more and more of their nights alone, neither distraught nor depressed, just simply estranged from the great social machinations with which others were occupied. After the forced intimacy of childhood was over, I found I had a hard time being close to others. The few friends I had made during college had all eventually moved on without me, not to different cities but to better lives within the same city where drinks and birthday presents, along with sex and intimacy, were casually exchanged.

Angela and I became close shortly after we began working at the immigration center together. She was one of the many volunteers, summer interns, and temporary employees who passed through the offices in any given year. Unlike all of the others who came and went without my ever knowing their last names, Angela and I had quickly found mutual points around which to bond. We were the only black people who worked at the center—anyone else of color in the office was most likely a former, present, or future client—a fact that Angela asked me about a few days after she began working there.

“Does that ever bother you? Especially since this is your full-time job.”

“I almost never think about it,” I told her. “And you?”

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t. But I wonder sometimes if it should.”

From there we found that we had other cultural and racial obligations that we could be anxious about if we cared to.

“What about the Africans who come into the center?” she asked me a few days later. “Do you like them more or less than the others? Be honest.”

“That depends,” I said.

“On what?”

“Which part of Africa. If they’re from the west coast, then to be honest it doesn’t matter much to me. East coast, however, is a different story.”

“We have a problem, then, here,” she said. “Being of African-American descent and all ...”

“I see what you’re saying. Your loyalties—”

“West side all the way,” she said.

We began to take lunch together in Chinatown almost every afternoon. It was Angela who suggested that we do so, even though she claimed she hated the sight of the ducks strung by their necks roasting in the restaurant windows.

“I’m part vegetarian,” she said. “Which is sort of like saying I’m part white because my grandfather was Irish. It doesn’t really count, and no one but me really believes it.”

Over various bowls of shared noodles, we began to divide up our clients between the west side and east side. We split the Africans first since they were the easiest. Benin, Togo, the whole western coast down to Namibia, and even large chunks of northern and central Africa went to Angela, from the Congo on west, which was fine, I said, because I had Somalia, “and no one wants to fuck with them.” When we were finished we moved on to South Asia, which we cut in half evenly down the middle, which hardly mattered since all of our clients from that region were Pakistani to begin with. Central America was later carved up according to each state’s proximity to the Gulf, and then there were the smaller pockets of the world that we settled on a case-by-case basis. A man from Fiji was given to Angela because she said he looked like an uncle of hers who lived in Boston; I took an entire family from Turkmenistan because their last name almost rhymed with mine. When we finished one week later, Angela had her imaginary west side crew, and I had mine to the east. If someone from my side was granted an asylum interview, it was a victory for everyone on my team. All I would have to say to Angela was “east side,” and she would know what I meant. She could and often did the same, not just with me but also with the other lawyers and interns at the office, who stared at her puzzled when she smiled and said, “West side wins again.” No one at the center besides us talked like that. When it came to conversations about our clients, the general mood was one of overwhelming sympathy buttressed by seemingly sincere, heartfelt statements such as “I can’t believe they had to go through that.” Angela could never talk like that, which was part of the reason why I admired her. Unlike almost everyone else who volunteered or worked at the center, she was happy with what she did there. “Refugees,” she said. “How could you not love them? Who else do you know has it worse.”

In the one year I had worked there before Angela arrived, more than a half-dozen volunteers and lawyers had come and gone, with nearly all departing for what would later be explained in group e-mails as personal reasons, or family reasons, when the truth, of course, was known to all who spent even the smallest portion of their lives there. We were losing all the time, on a weekly if not daily basis: clients abruptly disappeared, and many of those who did not were eventually scheduled to be deported; we were helpless in the face of both. One week a man from Honduras took flight; the next a family of four from Liberia whose asylum application was coming up for a review vanished into a corner of the Bronx. Like everyone else who came to us, they knew their chances, despite whatever reassurances they might have heard from the four full-time lawyers who worked there. Better than decent odds were never good enough—only full-on certainty could make those who had risked their lives or lost their fortunes getting here sit idle while someone else decided their fate.

Angela was the only other person besides Bill, the center’s bald and rapidly aging veteran lawyer and director, who knew how to temper that loss with an appreciation for reality. Bill often joked that the real reason the center existed was to give people enough time to learn how the system worked before they vanished.

“And for that,” he said, “the bastards don’t even thank us.”

Most of the victories that we could claim came easy; every month Bill chose a few cases whose outcomes could almost always be predicted in advance—the former doctor or lawyer from Cuba, the political dissident from China, or the recent victims of a particularly horrific African war that had briefly made its way into the headlines and had earned the attention of a senator or congressman. We knew that we could generally count on these to bolster our year-end report, in which we tallied up our wins and losses before doctoring the outcome in order to make sure we had come out ahead.

My job at the center was to read through the asylum statements as soon as they came in, although initially I was hired only to answer the phone and deflect the frequent calls from creditors who were demanding payment for whatever minor services had been rendered to keep the office functioning. Money was owed to multiple Xerox repairmen, along with several different plumbers and one electrical technician who frequently threatened to come down to our office. Undoubtedly it was my name more than my English degree that had first gotten me the job and then later the promotion that came with a change in responsibilities and a monthly subway card. Jonas Woldemariam had a perfect degree of foreignness to it for the center’s needs, almost as deeply vested in America from the sound of it as John or Jane, but with something reassuringly “other” at the end. I could be Jonas, or Jon, or J, and of course when Bill needed, Mr. Woldemariam, who despite distance and birth, remained at heart an African. If many of the clients, especially those who came from neighboring African nations, were disappointed at seeing me when they first walked through the doors, they were undoubtedly relieved by the time they met the white middle-aged lawyers who would perhaps someday stand next to them in court. It was one thing for our paths to cross on the street or at a restaurant, behind the counter of a grocery store, and another thing entirely to stake our futures on one another. I once heard Bill, who at fifty-three still hadn’t learned how to whisper when he meant to talk discreetly, tell someone over the phone how lucky they were to find me.

“He’s completely American,” he said, “but you wouldn’t necessarily guess that from just looking at him. It’s important for the clients to see that.”

When it came to the personal statements that each asylum applicant had to write, my job, at least at the beginning, was to assign them to one of two piles, which in my head I had listed as the persecuted and not so persecuted. The persecuted were the easiest to read through—the narratives almost always self-evident, and succinct—while the not so persecuted tended to ramble and digress and include statements such as “It’s been a dream of mine” or “The opportunity to pursue ...” There was never that sort of wishful thinking in the others—a cold, almost hard pragmatism was the rule of the day, with the governing philosophy simply stated as I have nowhere else to go or there is nothing for me to return to. Often there were such statements as: The village, city, town, country I came from, was born in, lived in for forty-five, sixty years was taken over, occupied, bombed, burned, destroyed, slaughtered, and I, my family, my sister, cousin, aunt, uncle, grandparents were arrested, shot, raped, detained, forced to say, tortured to say, threatened if we did not say that we would vote, not vote, believed in or did not believe, supported or denounced the government or movement or religion of X. In the end the consequences were always the same, and each ended with a similar emphatic note: We, I, can’t, won’t, will never be able to go back.

It was only Bill and the three other lawyers who dealt at any great length with the clients directly. I saw the clients mainly as they came and went through the dimly lit corridors of our offices, which were undoubtedly worn and in desperate need of new carpet. I often exchanged nothing more than a brief hello and good-bye with them. Had it not been New York, the range of faces that passed through our doors would have seemed extraordinary to me, but there was no chance of claiming that here. Any attempt to do so was thwarted by a greater chaos waiting outside. One of the volunteer lawyers who came down from the Upper East Side twice a month to work at the center once declared that our little office, with its vast range of clients, was the perfect microcosm of greater New York. After only a few months at the center, however, I was convinced that our office was not a microcosm of anything; it wasn’t even a reflection of a larger whole, which in fact was a myth to begin with. Our African clients were all in the Bronx, the Chinese in a different section of Queens from the South Asians, while anyone from the Caribbean was in Brooklyn; all we had were thin, crooked, and fiercely territorial wedges stacked next to one another.

Those who came seeking help often did so with a faint trace of shame hovering over them—the sense that they were once again pleading to someone to grant them a right that everyone else they passed on the street, on the subway, and in traffic took for granted trailed them in almost all of their dealings and most likely made them more deferential than they had ever been. It was hard sometimes to look at them when they came in like that, and I would be lying if I didn’t admit to averting my gaze, even though Bill had explicitly told me not to.

“How else will they be sure that you respect them, if you don’t look at them honestly in the eyes?” he had said. The problem, however, was that I was never sure if I really did respect them—those that came in with those war-weary faces often seemed so desperate to please and to attach themselves to someone that all I could muster for them was pity.

On occasion I would try to match their faces to the statements I had read. Who among this haphazard and wandering tribe was Afghani or Pakistani, Sudanese or just pretending to be because they knew it made the process easier? If I didn’t know for certain when they entered, I assigned them the narrative that I thought they deserved. A gray-haired and prematurely stooped man who tried to look his best in his donation suit was the Iranian professor whose statement I had read a few days earlier, even if there was no chance that could have been true. His real life had clearly been much harder. The difficult stories, the ones that came with death or prison and rape, I left alone. I never tried to imagine whom they belonged to. It made it that much easier to bring the clients coffee or tea or Coke before they had a chance to ask.

In time I was given the job of editing out the less credible or unnecessary parts of some of the narratives, while at the same time pointing out places where some stories could be expanded upon or magnified for greater narrative effect. I was seen as the literary type in the office, with my background in literature and my supposed desire to get my Ph.D. Angela, as one of the summer lawyers working at the center before her more profitable private-law career began, would pass stories to me that needed to be “touched” or “built upon.” I took half-page statements of a coarse and often brutal nature and supplied them with the details that made them real for the immigration officer who would someday be reading them. I took “They came at night” and turned it into “We had all gone to sleep for the evening, my wife, mother, and two children. All the fires in the village had already been put out, but there was a bright moon, and it was possible to see even in the darkness the shapes of all the houses. That’s why they attacked that night.”