Transcript
A (0:01)
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.
B (1:21)
I'm exhausted.
A (1:23)
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.
B (1:39)
You're not going to get detained, she
A (1:42)
said, brushing hair from my face.
B (1:45)
You're going to answer questions and then we're going to get lunch.
A (1:50)
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.