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- [00:01]
A
Episode 4 the Uncertainty Gateway Rain fell on New Jersey that early summer morning. Steady, patient, indifferent to what the day held. Ten years after filing for asylum, I had been invited to an interview. The email had felt procedural. A date, a time, a location. Nothing emotional about it. Bureaucracy rarely is. It does not tremble. It does not grieve. It schedules. I hired a lawyer immediately. We reviewed everything. The years of documentation, the paper trail of a life constructed under threat. The photographs, the dates, the affidavits, the names of those who had disappeared. There would be no adversarial action, she assured me. Just questions, clarifications. You're not going to get detained. That's what they said. The night before Aspen and I lay awake longer than we admitted. We tried to have sex, not because the moment was romantic but because it felt like something normal people do before ordinary mornings, an act of defiance disguised as intimacy.
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B
I'm exhausted.
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A
I kissed her anyway. Slow, lingering, half playful. She kissed me back, smiling into it. What if I get detained tomorrow? I said, trying to make it sound like a joke. She pulled back just enough to look at me.
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B
You're not going to get detained, she
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said, brushing hair from my face.
- [01:45]
B
You're going to answer questions and then we're going to get lunch.
- [01:50]
A
I kissed her again. We didn't finish. We fell asleep, tangled together, the kind of closeness that feels ordinary, which is what makes it sacred. Later. I didn't know then that I was memorizing her without knowing it. In the morning we dressed carefully. I wore a dark Armani suit and brown Louis Vuitton shoes and a Rolex watch. I wanted to look like the life I had built, not the one I had fled but the one I had constructed deliberately in the years since. The suit was armor. The shoes were a declaration. The watch was proof that time had moved forward. The address was Gateway 3, 100 Mulberry Street. Remember it. It will come back. The building was a high rise, glass and steel, indistinguishable from every other corporate tower in Newark. Immigration shared space with consulting firms and something vaguely labeled Global Solutions. Rain streaked down the facade. There was something fitting about that, about the erasure of distinction, as if the building itself had been designed to make the extraordinary feel routine. I needed to use the restroom, the morning coffee. The nerves. The body doesn't suspend itself for occasions like this. It goes on, living insistently, even when you wish it would hold still. We walked into the lobby. Card activated security gates like subway turnstiles, Two guards, a receptionist behind glass. We asked. They said no. So we walked to Penn Station, used the bathroom there, and came back, a small indignity before the larger ones. In retrospect, it was the first sign of the day that this building had no interest in accommodating you. It only had interest in processing you. We took the elevator up. The waiting room was lined with flags from different countries, dozens of them, fabric and color arranged side by side without hierarchy. Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Venezuela, Ukraine. I found Egypt's before I meant to. Red, white, black, the eagle of Salahuddin, gold at its center. I had not lived under that flag in more than a decade, and still my eyes went to it the way your tongue finds a missing tooth, automatically, helplessly, out of some reflex, older than reason. Salahuddin. History remembers him for battles and empires, but the story that stayed with me was smaller. After the Battle of Hattin, two captured crusader leaders were brought before him. One of them was was dying of thirst. Salahuddin offered him a cup of cold water. In the customs of the region, that gesture meant protection. Once a man had been given food or drink by his captor, his life was considered safe. When the prisoner passed the cup to another man beside him, Saladin stopped him and said, I did not give him the water. The distinction mattered. I did not know then why that story surfaced in that moment, standing in an American waiting room, looking at the flag of a country I had fled, waiting for a stranger to determine whether I could stay in this one. I would understand later. Something between recognition and distance settled over me, like seeing a photograph of a house you no longer live in. The flags felt welcoming. The room felt international. It felt like the idea of America. Aspen squeezed my hand. My lawyer nodded. A woman stepped into the doorway, holding a tablet. Adam Saad, she said, reading from the screen. Her voice was even administrative. We followed her down a hallway into a closed, windowless interview room. She sat across from me at a desk. The computer screen faced her. I could not see it. Ten years of my life were presumably somewhere on that screen, rendered into fields and checkboxes, into the kind of language that is easy to sort and impossible to feel.
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B
I'll be asking you a series of questions. If I'm not looking at you, it's because I'm typing.
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A
She did not look at me again. Her tone never shifted, monotone, measured, masked. She read from the screen and typed continuously. I could not see what she was writing. I did not know how my words, the protests, the fear, the gas, the names were being converted into the record.
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B
How are you feeling today?
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A
A little anxious. That phrase would later become official, little anxious, the inner weather of a man whose life was being adjudicated, reduced to two words in a government file somewhere, stripped of context, stripped of history, stripped of everything that made it true. She offered me water. I took it as protection. She asked about protests in 2011, about gas bombs and rubber bullets, about masked men kidnapping civilians from their homes and streets. She asked why I feared returning to Egypt. Because I hold different political opinions. Because I asked questions about God, that my country considers a crime. Because people are killed for that, she typed. When I referenced that President Trump had publicly referred to President Sisi as his favorite dictator, she did not look up. She asked me to spell names. She did not know the political timeline. She did not know Egypt beyond the fields on her screen, the history of a country, the texture of its fear, reduced to a spelling exercise. She was not hostile. She was procedural, and somehow that was worse. That indifference requires no malice. That a life can be determined by someone who simply isn't curious about it. Four hours passed. the end, she rotated the screen toward me.
- [08:29]
B
Please sign.
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A
I signed.
- [08:34]
B
The decision will be mailed.
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A
10 years of waiting reduced to a future envelope. I thought, this is how it ends. For now. I thought lunch. I thought of Aspen, on the other side of a wall, waiting. And of my brother. And of the flags. I stood, expecting to return to the waiting room. The door opened. Three men stepped inside. Black outfits, badges. Mr. Sod? Yes? We're with ICE. The air shifted, not dramatically, not the way it shifts in films, with music in slow motion. Just a subtle rearrangement of what was possible in the room. You'll need to come with us. For what? For overstaying your visa. I have a pending asylum application. That won't be relevant today. The sentence did not rise. It landed. I understood in that moment that language, in the hands of institutions with power and is not communication. It is verdict. And verdicts do not negotiate. They cuffed me, not violently, but efficiently. The steel was cool against my wrists, precise, practiced. I left my phone, my wallet, my bag, everything that proved I was a person with a life outside this room, with my lawyer. They did not take me back through the waiting room. They escorted me through a different hallway, narrower, without flags, without windows, and into a service elevator. I did not see Aspen. I did not get to explain. No. Goodbye. I have thought about that hallway many times since. The way a building can be designed to make disappearance frictionless, to move a person from one world into another without disturbing either. She was somewhere on the other side of a wall, waiting for me to walk back through a door I would not walk back through. I do not know exactly what she was told. I only know she walked into that hallway expecting me to return and I did not. Down the elevator, through a service corridor, into the rain. The rain had not stopped. It did not know it was supposed to mean something. A dark tinted unmarked Dodge van waited at the curb. The windows were blacked out. We drove. No one told me where. The city blurred into gray, the towers, the bridges, the life I had built, passing behind tinted glass like a dream you can't hold. We arrived at what looked like a warehouse, a hangar like building in Newark, industrial and unmarked. Fluorescent lights hummed inside over concrete floors and metal tables. The hum was the sound of a place that processed things rather than received them. An ICE officer stood vaping near the entrance. He looked less like authority and more like someone who had lost interest in it. Jersey Shore style. Tattoos, blank stare. The particular vacancy of a man for whom the extraordinary had long since become routine, the kind of man who would explain constitutional rights in the same tone one uses to describe parking validation. Not that he explained any. The Constitution, after all, is a piece of paper in a building in Washington. And the orders in his hand were considerably closer. He fingerprinted me. Remove my belt, remove my shoelaces. The brown Louis Vuitton shoes suddenly felt theatrical. The declaration they had been that morning. Look at the life I have built now looked like a costume, as if the self I had dressed into that morning was already being undressed, layer by layer, until what remained was only the data. I another detainee was in the same cell, sleeping on his side, curling in a fetus position, shaking, sweating, going through withdrawal. We did not speak. There are forms of suffering that exist beyond language, that ask only to be witnessed, not interpreted, not solved. I witnessed. I was processed like inventory. Name, date of birth, country. Not what are you afraid of? Not what did you leave behind, not who is waiting for you. Name, date of birth, country. They allowed one phone call. I called my lawyer first. They'll request an emergency bond hearing, she said. If granted, maybe two or three weeks. Two or three weeks sounded survivable. It had the shape of something a person could endure. If not, she added carefully, it could be months. Months did not register. Some measurements of time only become real inside them. Then I called Aspen. She answered on the first ring.
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B
Adam.
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Her voice. Just my name and her voice, and I almost couldn't continue. I've been arrested. There was silence on her end, the kind where reality rearranges itself, where a person takes what they knew to be true and has to rebuild it around a new fact. My lawyer is filing for an emergency bond, I continued. They're working on it. Where are you? I don't know. They're transferring me somewhere. Where? They didn't say. Rain tapped against something metallic outside the building. Patient Persistent. Still falling.
- [15:08]
B
We'll figure it out.
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It sounded like a promise. It sounded like a question. I love you.
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B
I love you.
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The line disconnected. An officer took the phone from my hand. I did not yet know the name of the place I was being sent. The flags were still hanging in that waiting room, and for the first time, uncertainty had a physical address. This is out of the Valley's shadow. Based on True Story Press follow.