Green Means Go by Itto and Mekiya Outini
Holly falls into a paranoid spiral as the US government intensifies its crackdown on "illegal" immigrants.
"Ma'am," says the man on the phone, "you listen to what I am telling. Very important. Listen me, or you will going to be deported."
I've just gotten up to pour myself a glass of Barefoot Riesling. On the TV, Tom Homan is shaking his fist before a crowd. On the laptop, whirring softly on the sofa, a lawyer is giving an impassioned lecture, warning his subscribers that not even our green cards will save us from the coming purge. He knows what he's talking about. He's Nigerian.
Once, in eighth grade, I played the part of Juliet in a middle school production. I was a good Juliet. At thirteen, I knew what I was talking about. The way I staggered about on stage, gripping the rubber dagger to my ribs while fake blood spurted - it was a high-value production - gasping, swooning, then collapsing, is exactly how I imagine each and every nerve cell in my body going out now, one by one, leaving me stricken on the kitchen threshold, dizzy, nauseated, numb.
"Who are you?" I demand.
"Harry. I am Harry. I work for US government, Ma'am."
I allow myself to sink onto the carpet, crisscross-applesauce. The refrigerator's hum sounds louder here, and the guttering of the heater, and the pulse of wires in the walls - all assault my senses, a cacophony, a roar. "DHS?"
"What is it?"
"Are you with the Department of Homeland Security?"
"I am hired from FBI, Ma'am."
"Oh." Goosebumps. Elevated heartrate. Fever. Chills. Stumblingly, I say, "You said I'm going to be deport... deported?"
"Ma'am, I can help you. I can help you to not be deported, but you must listen. Listen me, your friend Harry, and do exactly as I am telling -"
"Are you also going to be deported?"
"What, Ma'am?"
"I'm sorry." I backpedal. "I don't mean to be rude. I just feel like we've all got to stick together. I couldn't help but notice that you've got a bit of an..." To make the observation more politically correct, I wrinkle up my nose and whisper, "accent."
"No, no, no. I am born right here in US, Ma'am. I am Harry."
"Hari?"
"Harry! Harry! You think this is matter for joking?"
"I'm not joking," I say. "I've just been listening to this lawyer, and the news, and what you're saying, about deporting, deportation... but my green card doesn't even expire until 2027. And still they're going to deport me? Have you checked yours? When does yours expire?"
"Nothing is expiring here, Ma'am -"
"Where are you from?" I ask. "India? Bangladesh? You've got to check and make sure, when does yours expire? I'll just be going back to Canada. At least we've got healthcare. I'm sure things will be harder for you. Is Hari a Bangladeshi name?"
"Now you are mocking," says Hari. "They are coming to your house to deport you, and you are mocking."
"I'm not mocking! I'm going to go check mine right now. I don't know if I misread it or something, but I swear it was a seven. Let's go check them together, Hari, while we're on the phone -"
"You are wasting time, Ma'am."
"And you said they're coming to my house? I don't even have one. I'm just renting. Do you mean apartment? They're coming to my apartment?"
"I'll fuck your ass," says Hari, "and come on your face."
He hangs up.
Hot tears crawl down both sides of my nose, form stalactites, and plop damply onto my sweatpants. Probably, I tell myself, Hari doesn't really work for the FBI. Probably. But how to be sure?
Eventually, I find the strength to rise and totter over to the fridge. Since the morning of November 6th, I've kept a printed copy of my green card pinned there with a maple leaf magnet. The black-and-white image is grainy, the ink streaked in places, and while I'm certain that the number in the bottom right-hand corner is a seven, it could, conceivably, be a smudged five. The original is under my pillow. It does say '27, I'm relieved to confirm. Once again, I remember to breathe.
Back in the living room, Homan is talking about one million, and thirteen million, and twenty-three million. The Nigerian lawyer has been replaced by an ad for a special salt that will allegedly make my man as strong as a horse. I don't have a man, but I feel like I could use a dose of that salt right now. Given that it's $37.99 an ounce plus tax and shipping, however, the Riesling will have to do.
I keep another copy of my green card tacked to the apartment door, but if the FBI does visit me, I realize now, they won't see it unless they enter the apartment. If they come at a bad time - when I'm in a meeting with my headset on, say, or asleep - they might call in a SWAT team, and my door might get broken down, and then, even if the FBI determines that my paperwork is all in order, I might get evicted, and if I get evicted, I might end up homeless, and if I end up homeless, the US will have to deport me.
Unsteady as a newborn foal, I unlock the front door, unfasten the chain, and, using the same thumbtack, remove the printout from the inside and pin it to the outside. Up and down the hall, muffled televisions burble quietly behind closed doors, but there are no men in suits or riot gear, no German Shepherds. Not yet. The weather is bad, the president-elect has not yet taken office, and the hall is mercifully empty.
"This isn't healthy," Mona tells me, brandishing the printout she's plucked from the fridge like a flower. It's Saturday afternoon. I'm still feeling the Riesling, which I finished last night, sitting alone in bed, hugging my knees. I wouldn't have slept if it weren't for the rain. The weather's let up, but the threat of it lingers, the sky outside cinderblock gray. The only splash of color anywhere is Mona, filling up my kitchen with her crimson dress - low-cut, of course - and her vanilla-cardamom perfume. She's got a date this afternoon, she told me on the phone - another date, another dollar - but she's got thirty minutes for me, maybe forty-five.
"With an American?" I'd asked.
"What's it to you?"
"You'd better hurry up and marry one, and soon."
March will mark her twenty-seventh year in the United States. For twenty-six and a half of them, she's been undocumented. Her brother brought her for a wedding in Atlanta when she was fifteen, and when her returning flight departed from gate, she wasn't onboard. How she's made it this long, impervious to the corrosion of uncertainty, I cannot understand.
"Therapy's bullshit," she tells me, sweeping magisterially into the living room, "but I think you need a little bullshit in your life right now. Get your mind off things."
Real life, according to Mona, is in the distractions. That's where everything that matters occurs. That's what I am to her, and she to me: what we've been to each other all along, since the dull singles mixer in 2018 where we talked to each other instead of the men. More than once, I've wondered whether I might not be gay, whether this might be the reason that my marriage fell apart, but then I remember that I'm frightened of vaginas, all the hairiness, the oozing; and the girl I long for, truth be told, is none other than my younger self, whom Mona, with her theatricality and bombast, merely happens to resemble.
"If I go to therapy," I point out, trailing her into the living room, "they'll know I'm not doing well. They don't want people who are mentally ill."
"What does it matter what they want?" She flops onto the sofa. The only way for me to sit is if I slide her legs onto my lap. I do. "They like their cheap labor, remember? They say one thing for the cameras and another to the donors. Once you're here, you're American. Plain and simple."
"That's not really how it works at all."
"You know what you're telling people when you wave your green card in their face?" she demands. "That you're not American. You know what I tell people? I'm American. It's true. The British fucked India, the Indians all became British. The French fucked Vietnam, the Vietnamese became French. America fucks Iraq, what do I become? American. And I look like this. Look at you." She waves a hand in my direction. "You're white: you're American. Plain and simple."
My whiteness sits in my esophagus like heartburn. My head feels too hot, and my feet feel too cold, and my heartbeat bangs away arrhythmically, and I know I'm not supposed to be afraid. Being afraid is just another way of taking up the spotlight, making myself the center of attention, when really, this time in history being what it is, I ought to be ceding the stage - except that the stage isn't safe. Not now. Not for Mona. Even if she thinks it is.
There was a time before I knew about the times, before the thought of what the spotlight said about me scared me, but then I met a man who made me understand that I can't act to save my life. He could see right through me, even things that I myself could not see - desires, motivations, fears - and these would've justified his hitting me whenever he felt like it. He just never felt like it. He could've broken all the bones in my body if he ever wanted to. He just never wanted to.
When I left Toronto for a job in Charlotte, he remarked that the company had probably hired me because the other candidates, the clever ones, might blow the whistle on whatever it was they were doing, whereas I, none the wiser, would placidly carry their water and prop up their evil schemes. "Corporate America will love you," he beamed.
I never told him where to find me, but he found me anyway. For a week, he stayed in a hotel somewhere in Charlotte, visiting my apartment every afternoon, leaving sweet little handwritten notes on my door. Probably making the neighbors jealous. Then he went home.
That was 2017. They weren't talking about deporting people like me then. They were talking about deporting people like Mona, but Mona didn't get deported, wasn't even afraid, and now they're talking about deporting everyone, starting, quite possibly, with the Canadians, and I am very much afraid. I've stopped cutting vegetables because my hands tremble and I may get accused of deliberately effacing my fingerprints. I think every day of the heart disease that runs in my family. I wonder whether my mother knew, while giving birth to me, that what she was about to bring into the world would amount to little more than an administrative problem, a living, breathing assemblage of inconveniences and errors.
"Take this." Mona folds something into my hand. "You'll feel better."
"What is this?"
"Delta-8. Twenty-five mil. Perfectly legal." I must not look convinced because she produces a receipt from her bag. "They're selling it all over now. I just bought some this morning."
"It won't get me high, will it?"
"It's just for relaxation." Her phone begins to buzz. "That's my ride," she announces, rising from the sofa.
"Mona?" She waits patiently for me to put my thoughts together. "Be careful out there," I tell her. "Please."
"They've really gotten to you, haven't they?" She scoffs lightly, drawing her coat on: not a derisive sound, but one of amusement and pity. "This is everyone's country. They just don't want you to think so. That's all."
When she's gone, I put the gummy bear into my mouth. It tastes of cherry, sugar crystals, and astringent herb. Her scent lingers like an unnamed season, fading as the aftertaste fades, both losing their sweetness, their charm. I wait for relaxation. Relaxation does not come.
I check my phone. There's an email from my boss: she wants me on a conference call. Her wanting me on Saturday makes me feel better somehow. If I'm wanted, then I will not be deported. I change into my work clothes, don my headset, and head for my office chair.
Half the department is there. The topic of discussion is an ad campaign. They want my approval. I offer it readily: eagerly, even. I am the Director of Communications, after all. Saying yes to everything is how Director of Communications earn their keep.
By the time I leave the meeting, all the lights in my apartment sound like crickets trading mating calls. My stomach, like one of those inflatable water toys, grows, becoming whale-sized, launching into song. I meant to go shopping today, but now the thought of leaving the apartment has become unbearable; but the hunger is unbearable, too. I'm craving Doritos like I've never craved Doritos before. Pregnancy seems unlikely given that I haven't slept with anyone in fifteen months, and that I'm forty-nine, but stranger things have happened, and the last thing I need right now is somebody accusing me of popping out an anchor baby. Maybe I should pick up some Plan B.
I keep a copy of my green card in the car, prominently displayed on the dashboard, but I don't want to take that one into the store because I might forget it in my pocket, or throw it away with the receipt, and it would be a nasty shock, the next time I'm out and about, to find myself undocumented. I decide to print a few more copies.
Before November 6th, I almost never used my printer, which I only bought in the first place as a way of proving to myself, mid-pandemic, that my extra bedroom really was a workspace, but in the last few months, he's seen a lot of action. He sits serenely on his stand, a small, square, eggshell-colored god, known to me and me alone as Print Charming.
Three copies, I order, just to be on the safe side. One for my left pocket, one for my right pocket, and one for my purse. That way, no matter where I think I've put it, I'll be right. I mash the numpad confidently, send the print-job, set Print Charming whinnying off at a gallop, and only then does it register with me that my finger's gone wide of mark, punching not only the three, but also the two keys above it, the five and the six - that, somehow, I've ordered not three copies, but six hundred and fifty-three.
"No." It's my own voice, breathy, low, and horror-stricken. "No... oh, no, no, no." My hands rise uselessly before me, floating in the air in a gesture of supplication. Insensate to my incantation, Print Charming implacably whirs. The furnace kicks on, panic grips my heart and squeezes, and papers gush forth from the gray, toothless maw. "No," I gasp hoarsely, "please, no," wrenching myself into motion, "please," crouching and casting about for the papers as they scatter and cascade, "that's enough, that's enough," and then I'm fleeing, out the door and down the hall.
Outside, the day has turned terribly cold. I take refuge in my PT Cruiser and wait for the engine to warm up. Will I be able to force open my apartment door, I wonder, shivering, blowing on my hands, and burrow all the way to the back bedroom, where my original green card lies? What if the neighbors, upset by the buckling walls and by Print Charming's groans, complain? If the police come, how will I explain?
One step at a time, I tell myself. The whale song has started in my belly again. I must answer its call.
Time flows like industrial sludge as I steer painstakingly through residential streets I know I ought to know. Through lighted windows, I catch glimpses into strangers' lives, which catch my gaze and drag it from the road. I fight to focus on the flurries coming down, the headlights, taillights, hazards, blinkers, high beams sparkling and winking, a Christmasy tableau. I know I ought to turn the wipers on, but I can't remember how to operate them. There are buttons on the dashboard that I've never used. I don't know what to do. I don't dare push them.
Everybody's breathing loudly in the store, too loudly, but what am I supposed to do about it? Ask them not to breathe? I can't remember what I came for, but I'll know it when I see it, so I choose a cart, the one that squeaks and pulls belligerently to the left, the worst one, and head into the aisles. Someplace nearby, just beyond the shelves, I can hear voices, two or three people talking, but there's something troubling about their speech. All the words sound familiar, and so does their iambic swish and swash, their flattened intonation, but nothing they're saying has any meaning. The more I listen, the more disconcerting this becomes. I can't tell if it's English. It must be, I tell myself. It must be English. I must have forgotten.
I'm still thinking in English, at least as far as I can tell, still formulating English thoughts, but speech and thoughts are not the same. Thoughts alone are not enough to prove to ICE that I'm a legal resident of the United States. How could I be when I don't speak the language - or any language, for that matter? This will present a headache for them if they move ahead with deportation. Where to send me?
Will they dump me in the ocean?
Real life, says Mona, is in the distractions. So, evidently, is that which sustains it: the proteins, lipids, vitamins, and complex carbohydrate chains that hold our bodies together. There's a frozen pizza in the freezer beside me. Probably, it's been there all along.
Leaving the obstinate cart in the aisle, I head for self-checkout, the pizza in hand, and suddenly, all at once, there I am, displayed on the screen set above the machine, warped by the fisheye, meeting my own startled gaze: haggard, red-eyed, jittery, and guilty-looking.
Showtime.
The smile I produce doesn't even come close to my best work. Wincing at the creak of those unpracticed muscles, I bend my cheeks as one might bend steel wires into mesh, looking like a teenager begging for her life in a low-budget thriller; like a feeble old woman possessed by the demons of incontinence; like a repentant patient petitioning the plastic surgeon, decades later, to take up his scalpel once more and slice away the complications. With as much nonchalance as I can muster, I pass the pizza over the scanner. When it doesn't beep, I pass it slowly back the other way, then slowly back again, eyes fixed on my grainy and trembling image.
The machine makes an unhappy noise. An error message flashes on the screen: please contact a shopping assistant.
As gingerly as possible lest I lose control and perpetrate a sudden motion, I lay the pizza down, an offering. Then, without taking my eyes from the screen where the woman with the false and ghastly rictus is backing away, I back slowly away. The camera loses sight of me just as my presence activates the automatic doors. My place is taken by a frigid gust as I plunge out into the parking lot and break into a run.
Two suits are standing in the hall: one broad-shouldered, dark-goateed, and surly; the other blond and green-eyed, boyish-looking. I knew that this would happen, and yet I know, too, stepping from the elevator, that it cannot be happening: that somehow, by virtue of its own inevitability, this contingency should have been stricken from the record, null and void. How many horrors, I ask myself, can be visited upon one person in a single afternoon? And then I hate myself because, of course, there are children in factories, and children in cages, and children in motels with cameras trained on them, brown children, black children, indigenous children, and next to theirs, my woes don't count for anything at all.
The blond one has a naturally open face, a face whose radiance, if transmitted through a magnifying lens, could scorch me to nothing, to shadows and ash. His colleague - who doesn't emit, who absorbs - has taken the printout from my door and is studying it as if sure it will lead him to treasure. He doesn't look up, not as I approach them, not even as the blond one hails me by my name:
"Holly Schweineger?"
My hands float upward of their own accord until they are above my shoulders, palms out to signal their emptiness. I stand mutely in the hall, not moving, not breathing, awaiting permission.
"Cooper," says the blond. "This is Harlowe. Holly, we would like a word."
"Will I need a lawyer?" My voice echoes and echoes. I imagine the neighbors all muting their TVs and pressing their ears to their doors.
"You're not under arrest," says Cooper. "In fact, if you're willing to have a conversation with us, we may be able to ensure that you don't end up under arrest. We'd rather have that conversation without lawyers."
"FBI?"
"That's right."
"Did Hari send you?"
The smile remains on Cooper's face, but through it steals an inorganic quality, leeching the ease from it, subtly altering its composition. His head ticks one degree to the left, and he says, "Hari?"
"Your colleague."
"If you don't mind," says Harlowe, who's endowed with an impressive baritone, looking up finally, meeting my gaze, "I think I'd like to ask a few questions about Hari, too."
"I don't know him." I shake my head quickly, emphatically. "Last night's when I met him for the first time. Talked to him, I mean. He called me. I just answered. He said he was FBI. I don't know if he really was. He said you were coming to deport me, but he didn't tell me why." I thrust one of my crumpled copies at them. "This is me. See? It's not expired. That's the expiration date, right there. The real one's inside." I nod at the door to my apartment. "Do you want to see?"
Harlow accepts my offering and holds it up next to the one from my door, comparing. Cooper says, "This Hari... you didn't send this image to him, did you?"
"No."
"Did he ask for any personal information?"
I shake my head no.
"How many of these copies have you made?" asks Harlowe.
"Over six hundred." Up go his eyebrows. "But that was an accident," I hastily add. "There's just supposed to be one on my door, and one on my refrigerator, and the ones I take with me, and one in my car. Oh, and one on my mailbox."
"Your mailbox?"
"In case they need it. You know. To verify that they're delivering my mail to me."
"Holly," says Cooper, "has anyone ever talked to you about the risk of identity theft?"
"Not that I remember, no. But see, right there, that's me." Holding up my last remaining copy, I tap my own image. "It's not stolen, I swear."
"There's a bank account," Harlowe says, his voice changing suddenly, "with six hundred fifty thousand dollars in it, as of this morning, in your name. There's also a car that was rented, also in your name, from a dealership down in El Paso. That car was pulled over two days ago. The driver was smuggling fentanyl, and children. Three children."
"Oh my god." That's me. That's my voice. That's my teeth forming sounds, and my lips, and my tongue.
"The driver," says Harlowe, "was traveling under the name of Holly Schweineger, Canadian national." It's his turn to tap the paper. "Same USCIS number. The picture looks pretty close, too."
"The thing is, Holly," chimes in Cooper, "we know you haven't been to El Paso."
"Although you have had recent and regular contact with an individual whose presence in this country is, shall we say, significantly overextended, and you haven't reported her to the authorities. Unless," he adds with a smirk, "you told your friend Hari about her."
"Then again," Cooper adds, "with all these photocopies lying around..."
"The situation's complicated."
"Here's the thing, Holly. We're the ones you want to be talking to right now. Not INS."
"We're the ones who don't think you've done anything wrong."
"If you're willing to sit down and talk with us, help us answer some questions... Holly?"
"Holly?"
"Easy, Holly. Easy, now."
But my language is fading, receding once more, like flakes on a windshield, like breath on a mirror, going out like a tide, and their words are dissolving, all sound and no meaning, and there's tightness in my chest, and clouds of glory in my lungs, and I am falling, weightless as a stone. I'm hitting the floor just like Juliet, sprawling like a little girl making angels in the snow, only it's not snow that's dancing above me, wafting, eddying, cascading - not an infinity of once-in-a-lifetimes: the opposite, really. The suits are silhouettes with blazing haloes, urgent eyes, but their arms aren't long enough to reach me, much less catch me and release me, and the proofs of my identity are coming thick and fast, all those faithful copies tumbling, multiplying, affirming, and reiterating, filling the void between the lines in black and white, incontrovertible, for all the world to see.
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I've just gotten up to pour myself a glass of Barefoot Riesling. On the TV, Tom Homan is shaking his fist before a crowd. On the laptop, whirring softly on the sofa, a lawyer is giving an impassioned lecture, warning his subscribers that not even our green cards will save us from the coming purge. He knows what he's talking about. He's Nigerian.
Once, in eighth grade, I played the part of Juliet in a middle school production. I was a good Juliet. At thirteen, I knew what I was talking about. The way I staggered about on stage, gripping the rubber dagger to my ribs while fake blood spurted - it was a high-value production - gasping, swooning, then collapsing, is exactly how I imagine each and every nerve cell in my body going out now, one by one, leaving me stricken on the kitchen threshold, dizzy, nauseated, numb.
"Who are you?" I demand.
"Harry. I am Harry. I work for US government, Ma'am."
I allow myself to sink onto the carpet, crisscross-applesauce. The refrigerator's hum sounds louder here, and the guttering of the heater, and the pulse of wires in the walls - all assault my senses, a cacophony, a roar. "DHS?"
"What is it?"
"Are you with the Department of Homeland Security?"
"I am hired from FBI, Ma'am."
"Oh." Goosebumps. Elevated heartrate. Fever. Chills. Stumblingly, I say, "You said I'm going to be deport... deported?"
"Ma'am, I can help you. I can help you to not be deported, but you must listen. Listen me, your friend Harry, and do exactly as I am telling -"
"Are you also going to be deported?"
"What, Ma'am?"
"I'm sorry." I backpedal. "I don't mean to be rude. I just feel like we've all got to stick together. I couldn't help but notice that you've got a bit of an..." To make the observation more politically correct, I wrinkle up my nose and whisper, "accent."
"No, no, no. I am born right here in US, Ma'am. I am Harry."
"Hari?"
"Harry! Harry! You think this is matter for joking?"
"I'm not joking," I say. "I've just been listening to this lawyer, and the news, and what you're saying, about deporting, deportation... but my green card doesn't even expire until 2027. And still they're going to deport me? Have you checked yours? When does yours expire?"
"Nothing is expiring here, Ma'am -"
"Where are you from?" I ask. "India? Bangladesh? You've got to check and make sure, when does yours expire? I'll just be going back to Canada. At least we've got healthcare. I'm sure things will be harder for you. Is Hari a Bangladeshi name?"
"Now you are mocking," says Hari. "They are coming to your house to deport you, and you are mocking."
"I'm not mocking! I'm going to go check mine right now. I don't know if I misread it or something, but I swear it was a seven. Let's go check them together, Hari, while we're on the phone -"
"You are wasting time, Ma'am."
"And you said they're coming to my house? I don't even have one. I'm just renting. Do you mean apartment? They're coming to my apartment?"
"I'll fuck your ass," says Hari, "and come on your face."
He hangs up.
Hot tears crawl down both sides of my nose, form stalactites, and plop damply onto my sweatpants. Probably, I tell myself, Hari doesn't really work for the FBI. Probably. But how to be sure?
Eventually, I find the strength to rise and totter over to the fridge. Since the morning of November 6th, I've kept a printed copy of my green card pinned there with a maple leaf magnet. The black-and-white image is grainy, the ink streaked in places, and while I'm certain that the number in the bottom right-hand corner is a seven, it could, conceivably, be a smudged five. The original is under my pillow. It does say '27, I'm relieved to confirm. Once again, I remember to breathe.
Back in the living room, Homan is talking about one million, and thirteen million, and twenty-three million. The Nigerian lawyer has been replaced by an ad for a special salt that will allegedly make my man as strong as a horse. I don't have a man, but I feel like I could use a dose of that salt right now. Given that it's $37.99 an ounce plus tax and shipping, however, the Riesling will have to do.
I keep another copy of my green card tacked to the apartment door, but if the FBI does visit me, I realize now, they won't see it unless they enter the apartment. If they come at a bad time - when I'm in a meeting with my headset on, say, or asleep - they might call in a SWAT team, and my door might get broken down, and then, even if the FBI determines that my paperwork is all in order, I might get evicted, and if I get evicted, I might end up homeless, and if I end up homeless, the US will have to deport me.
Unsteady as a newborn foal, I unlock the front door, unfasten the chain, and, using the same thumbtack, remove the printout from the inside and pin it to the outside. Up and down the hall, muffled televisions burble quietly behind closed doors, but there are no men in suits or riot gear, no German Shepherds. Not yet. The weather is bad, the president-elect has not yet taken office, and the hall is mercifully empty.
"This isn't healthy," Mona tells me, brandishing the printout she's plucked from the fridge like a flower. It's Saturday afternoon. I'm still feeling the Riesling, which I finished last night, sitting alone in bed, hugging my knees. I wouldn't have slept if it weren't for the rain. The weather's let up, but the threat of it lingers, the sky outside cinderblock gray. The only splash of color anywhere is Mona, filling up my kitchen with her crimson dress - low-cut, of course - and her vanilla-cardamom perfume. She's got a date this afternoon, she told me on the phone - another date, another dollar - but she's got thirty minutes for me, maybe forty-five.
"With an American?" I'd asked.
"What's it to you?"
"You'd better hurry up and marry one, and soon."
March will mark her twenty-seventh year in the United States. For twenty-six and a half of them, she's been undocumented. Her brother brought her for a wedding in Atlanta when she was fifteen, and when her returning flight departed from gate, she wasn't onboard. How she's made it this long, impervious to the corrosion of uncertainty, I cannot understand.
"Therapy's bullshit," she tells me, sweeping magisterially into the living room, "but I think you need a little bullshit in your life right now. Get your mind off things."
Real life, according to Mona, is in the distractions. That's where everything that matters occurs. That's what I am to her, and she to me: what we've been to each other all along, since the dull singles mixer in 2018 where we talked to each other instead of the men. More than once, I've wondered whether I might not be gay, whether this might be the reason that my marriage fell apart, but then I remember that I'm frightened of vaginas, all the hairiness, the oozing; and the girl I long for, truth be told, is none other than my younger self, whom Mona, with her theatricality and bombast, merely happens to resemble.
"If I go to therapy," I point out, trailing her into the living room, "they'll know I'm not doing well. They don't want people who are mentally ill."
"What does it matter what they want?" She flops onto the sofa. The only way for me to sit is if I slide her legs onto my lap. I do. "They like their cheap labor, remember? They say one thing for the cameras and another to the donors. Once you're here, you're American. Plain and simple."
"That's not really how it works at all."
"You know what you're telling people when you wave your green card in their face?" she demands. "That you're not American. You know what I tell people? I'm American. It's true. The British fucked India, the Indians all became British. The French fucked Vietnam, the Vietnamese became French. America fucks Iraq, what do I become? American. And I look like this. Look at you." She waves a hand in my direction. "You're white: you're American. Plain and simple."
My whiteness sits in my esophagus like heartburn. My head feels too hot, and my feet feel too cold, and my heartbeat bangs away arrhythmically, and I know I'm not supposed to be afraid. Being afraid is just another way of taking up the spotlight, making myself the center of attention, when really, this time in history being what it is, I ought to be ceding the stage - except that the stage isn't safe. Not now. Not for Mona. Even if she thinks it is.
There was a time before I knew about the times, before the thought of what the spotlight said about me scared me, but then I met a man who made me understand that I can't act to save my life. He could see right through me, even things that I myself could not see - desires, motivations, fears - and these would've justified his hitting me whenever he felt like it. He just never felt like it. He could've broken all the bones in my body if he ever wanted to. He just never wanted to.
When I left Toronto for a job in Charlotte, he remarked that the company had probably hired me because the other candidates, the clever ones, might blow the whistle on whatever it was they were doing, whereas I, none the wiser, would placidly carry their water and prop up their evil schemes. "Corporate America will love you," he beamed.
I never told him where to find me, but he found me anyway. For a week, he stayed in a hotel somewhere in Charlotte, visiting my apartment every afternoon, leaving sweet little handwritten notes on my door. Probably making the neighbors jealous. Then he went home.
That was 2017. They weren't talking about deporting people like me then. They were talking about deporting people like Mona, but Mona didn't get deported, wasn't even afraid, and now they're talking about deporting everyone, starting, quite possibly, with the Canadians, and I am very much afraid. I've stopped cutting vegetables because my hands tremble and I may get accused of deliberately effacing my fingerprints. I think every day of the heart disease that runs in my family. I wonder whether my mother knew, while giving birth to me, that what she was about to bring into the world would amount to little more than an administrative problem, a living, breathing assemblage of inconveniences and errors.
"Take this." Mona folds something into my hand. "You'll feel better."
"What is this?"
"Delta-8. Twenty-five mil. Perfectly legal." I must not look convinced because she produces a receipt from her bag. "They're selling it all over now. I just bought some this morning."
"It won't get me high, will it?"
"It's just for relaxation." Her phone begins to buzz. "That's my ride," she announces, rising from the sofa.
"Mona?" She waits patiently for me to put my thoughts together. "Be careful out there," I tell her. "Please."
"They've really gotten to you, haven't they?" She scoffs lightly, drawing her coat on: not a derisive sound, but one of amusement and pity. "This is everyone's country. They just don't want you to think so. That's all."
When she's gone, I put the gummy bear into my mouth. It tastes of cherry, sugar crystals, and astringent herb. Her scent lingers like an unnamed season, fading as the aftertaste fades, both losing their sweetness, their charm. I wait for relaxation. Relaxation does not come.
I check my phone. There's an email from my boss: she wants me on a conference call. Her wanting me on Saturday makes me feel better somehow. If I'm wanted, then I will not be deported. I change into my work clothes, don my headset, and head for my office chair.
Half the department is there. The topic of discussion is an ad campaign. They want my approval. I offer it readily: eagerly, even. I am the Director of Communications, after all. Saying yes to everything is how Director of Communications earn their keep.
By the time I leave the meeting, all the lights in my apartment sound like crickets trading mating calls. My stomach, like one of those inflatable water toys, grows, becoming whale-sized, launching into song. I meant to go shopping today, but now the thought of leaving the apartment has become unbearable; but the hunger is unbearable, too. I'm craving Doritos like I've never craved Doritos before. Pregnancy seems unlikely given that I haven't slept with anyone in fifteen months, and that I'm forty-nine, but stranger things have happened, and the last thing I need right now is somebody accusing me of popping out an anchor baby. Maybe I should pick up some Plan B.
I keep a copy of my green card in the car, prominently displayed on the dashboard, but I don't want to take that one into the store because I might forget it in my pocket, or throw it away with the receipt, and it would be a nasty shock, the next time I'm out and about, to find myself undocumented. I decide to print a few more copies.
Before November 6th, I almost never used my printer, which I only bought in the first place as a way of proving to myself, mid-pandemic, that my extra bedroom really was a workspace, but in the last few months, he's seen a lot of action. He sits serenely on his stand, a small, square, eggshell-colored god, known to me and me alone as Print Charming.
Three copies, I order, just to be on the safe side. One for my left pocket, one for my right pocket, and one for my purse. That way, no matter where I think I've put it, I'll be right. I mash the numpad confidently, send the print-job, set Print Charming whinnying off at a gallop, and only then does it register with me that my finger's gone wide of mark, punching not only the three, but also the two keys above it, the five and the six - that, somehow, I've ordered not three copies, but six hundred and fifty-three.
"No." It's my own voice, breathy, low, and horror-stricken. "No... oh, no, no, no." My hands rise uselessly before me, floating in the air in a gesture of supplication. Insensate to my incantation, Print Charming implacably whirs. The furnace kicks on, panic grips my heart and squeezes, and papers gush forth from the gray, toothless maw. "No," I gasp hoarsely, "please, no," wrenching myself into motion, "please," crouching and casting about for the papers as they scatter and cascade, "that's enough, that's enough," and then I'm fleeing, out the door and down the hall.
Outside, the day has turned terribly cold. I take refuge in my PT Cruiser and wait for the engine to warm up. Will I be able to force open my apartment door, I wonder, shivering, blowing on my hands, and burrow all the way to the back bedroom, where my original green card lies? What if the neighbors, upset by the buckling walls and by Print Charming's groans, complain? If the police come, how will I explain?
One step at a time, I tell myself. The whale song has started in my belly again. I must answer its call.
Time flows like industrial sludge as I steer painstakingly through residential streets I know I ought to know. Through lighted windows, I catch glimpses into strangers' lives, which catch my gaze and drag it from the road. I fight to focus on the flurries coming down, the headlights, taillights, hazards, blinkers, high beams sparkling and winking, a Christmasy tableau. I know I ought to turn the wipers on, but I can't remember how to operate them. There are buttons on the dashboard that I've never used. I don't know what to do. I don't dare push them.
Everybody's breathing loudly in the store, too loudly, but what am I supposed to do about it? Ask them not to breathe? I can't remember what I came for, but I'll know it when I see it, so I choose a cart, the one that squeaks and pulls belligerently to the left, the worst one, and head into the aisles. Someplace nearby, just beyond the shelves, I can hear voices, two or three people talking, but there's something troubling about their speech. All the words sound familiar, and so does their iambic swish and swash, their flattened intonation, but nothing they're saying has any meaning. The more I listen, the more disconcerting this becomes. I can't tell if it's English. It must be, I tell myself. It must be English. I must have forgotten.
I'm still thinking in English, at least as far as I can tell, still formulating English thoughts, but speech and thoughts are not the same. Thoughts alone are not enough to prove to ICE that I'm a legal resident of the United States. How could I be when I don't speak the language - or any language, for that matter? This will present a headache for them if they move ahead with deportation. Where to send me?
Will they dump me in the ocean?
Real life, says Mona, is in the distractions. So, evidently, is that which sustains it: the proteins, lipids, vitamins, and complex carbohydrate chains that hold our bodies together. There's a frozen pizza in the freezer beside me. Probably, it's been there all along.
Leaving the obstinate cart in the aisle, I head for self-checkout, the pizza in hand, and suddenly, all at once, there I am, displayed on the screen set above the machine, warped by the fisheye, meeting my own startled gaze: haggard, red-eyed, jittery, and guilty-looking.
Showtime.
The smile I produce doesn't even come close to my best work. Wincing at the creak of those unpracticed muscles, I bend my cheeks as one might bend steel wires into mesh, looking like a teenager begging for her life in a low-budget thriller; like a feeble old woman possessed by the demons of incontinence; like a repentant patient petitioning the plastic surgeon, decades later, to take up his scalpel once more and slice away the complications. With as much nonchalance as I can muster, I pass the pizza over the scanner. When it doesn't beep, I pass it slowly back the other way, then slowly back again, eyes fixed on my grainy and trembling image.
The machine makes an unhappy noise. An error message flashes on the screen: please contact a shopping assistant.
As gingerly as possible lest I lose control and perpetrate a sudden motion, I lay the pizza down, an offering. Then, without taking my eyes from the screen where the woman with the false and ghastly rictus is backing away, I back slowly away. The camera loses sight of me just as my presence activates the automatic doors. My place is taken by a frigid gust as I plunge out into the parking lot and break into a run.
Two suits are standing in the hall: one broad-shouldered, dark-goateed, and surly; the other blond and green-eyed, boyish-looking. I knew that this would happen, and yet I know, too, stepping from the elevator, that it cannot be happening: that somehow, by virtue of its own inevitability, this contingency should have been stricken from the record, null and void. How many horrors, I ask myself, can be visited upon one person in a single afternoon? And then I hate myself because, of course, there are children in factories, and children in cages, and children in motels with cameras trained on them, brown children, black children, indigenous children, and next to theirs, my woes don't count for anything at all.
The blond one has a naturally open face, a face whose radiance, if transmitted through a magnifying lens, could scorch me to nothing, to shadows and ash. His colleague - who doesn't emit, who absorbs - has taken the printout from my door and is studying it as if sure it will lead him to treasure. He doesn't look up, not as I approach them, not even as the blond one hails me by my name:
"Holly Schweineger?"
My hands float upward of their own accord until they are above my shoulders, palms out to signal their emptiness. I stand mutely in the hall, not moving, not breathing, awaiting permission.
"Cooper," says the blond. "This is Harlowe. Holly, we would like a word."
"Will I need a lawyer?" My voice echoes and echoes. I imagine the neighbors all muting their TVs and pressing their ears to their doors.
"You're not under arrest," says Cooper. "In fact, if you're willing to have a conversation with us, we may be able to ensure that you don't end up under arrest. We'd rather have that conversation without lawyers."
"FBI?"
"That's right."
"Did Hari send you?"
The smile remains on Cooper's face, but through it steals an inorganic quality, leeching the ease from it, subtly altering its composition. His head ticks one degree to the left, and he says, "Hari?"
"Your colleague."
"If you don't mind," says Harlowe, who's endowed with an impressive baritone, looking up finally, meeting my gaze, "I think I'd like to ask a few questions about Hari, too."
"I don't know him." I shake my head quickly, emphatically. "Last night's when I met him for the first time. Talked to him, I mean. He called me. I just answered. He said he was FBI. I don't know if he really was. He said you were coming to deport me, but he didn't tell me why." I thrust one of my crumpled copies at them. "This is me. See? It's not expired. That's the expiration date, right there. The real one's inside." I nod at the door to my apartment. "Do you want to see?"
Harlow accepts my offering and holds it up next to the one from my door, comparing. Cooper says, "This Hari... you didn't send this image to him, did you?"
"No."
"Did he ask for any personal information?"
I shake my head no.
"How many of these copies have you made?" asks Harlowe.
"Over six hundred." Up go his eyebrows. "But that was an accident," I hastily add. "There's just supposed to be one on my door, and one on my refrigerator, and the ones I take with me, and one in my car. Oh, and one on my mailbox."
"Your mailbox?"
"In case they need it. You know. To verify that they're delivering my mail to me."
"Holly," says Cooper, "has anyone ever talked to you about the risk of identity theft?"
"Not that I remember, no. But see, right there, that's me." Holding up my last remaining copy, I tap my own image. "It's not stolen, I swear."
"There's a bank account," Harlowe says, his voice changing suddenly, "with six hundred fifty thousand dollars in it, as of this morning, in your name. There's also a car that was rented, also in your name, from a dealership down in El Paso. That car was pulled over two days ago. The driver was smuggling fentanyl, and children. Three children."
"Oh my god." That's me. That's my voice. That's my teeth forming sounds, and my lips, and my tongue.
"The driver," says Harlowe, "was traveling under the name of Holly Schweineger, Canadian national." It's his turn to tap the paper. "Same USCIS number. The picture looks pretty close, too."
"The thing is, Holly," chimes in Cooper, "we know you haven't been to El Paso."
"Although you have had recent and regular contact with an individual whose presence in this country is, shall we say, significantly overextended, and you haven't reported her to the authorities. Unless," he adds with a smirk, "you told your friend Hari about her."
"Then again," Cooper adds, "with all these photocopies lying around..."
"The situation's complicated."
"Here's the thing, Holly. We're the ones you want to be talking to right now. Not INS."
"We're the ones who don't think you've done anything wrong."
"If you're willing to sit down and talk with us, help us answer some questions... Holly?"
"Holly?"
"Easy, Holly. Easy, now."
But my language is fading, receding once more, like flakes on a windshield, like breath on a mirror, going out like a tide, and their words are dissolving, all sound and no meaning, and there's tightness in my chest, and clouds of glory in my lungs, and I am falling, weightless as a stone. I'm hitting the floor just like Juliet, sprawling like a little girl making angels in the snow, only it's not snow that's dancing above me, wafting, eddying, cascading - not an infinity of once-in-a-lifetimes: the opposite, really. The suits are silhouettes with blazing haloes, urgent eyes, but their arms aren't long enough to reach me, much less catch me and release me, and the proofs of my identity are coming thick and fast, all those faithful copies tumbling, multiplying, affirming, and reiterating, filling the void between the lines in black and white, incontrovertible, for all the world to see.
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