The Weight of Shadows (11 page)

It looks so composed, for a moment I think about taking their photo, but instead I just sketch their long slender extremities on the back of a government booklet I'd been given to study. More than their semblance, I'm interested in what's not going on around them, in the invisible relations that hold everything here in place, the still tension with which they sit and hang on their lawyer's every word. This building houses the administrative arm of the immigration apparatus, the place where the single sheets of paper that can change everything about a person's life are printed, signed, stamped, or examined and passed along. This is the castle of papers, the papers I'd grown up hearing so much about. But how does one apprehend, let alone capture, these muted bonds, these minute movements, these paperwork and keystroke power structures that build and sustain American empire?

The young brown man's presence in this office, and the fact that his new bride and attorney flank him, means they've probably already failed a little. It means that during their first interview they didn't convince the interviewer theirs was
a bona fide marriage, whatever that means. The young man who I believe is undocumented is now in a more precarious place than before he started because there is no turning back. Before, he was in the relative safety of contingent anonymity. The state didn't know who he was, where he lived, or what his name was, but now he's provided all that previously guarded information on forms he filled out himself. He has completely exposed himself, and so far it does not seem good.

The attorney closes his eyes and nods gently. To feign concern is not part of his job—it's a personal courtesy, an added bonus, or maybe he does care. Maybe his outward display is genuine, in which case, as an immigration attorney he'll have to learn not to care so much, to do his best, yes, but not lose sleep over every deported individual, because there have been many, and there will continue to be many. Doctors know this: they have to steel themselves, go significantly cold in order to continue working dispassionately amid a relentless succession of sorrows. The attorney's role is to know the complicated matrix of always-shifting immigration law—an intractable knot of specialized language—and guide them through as best he can. If the couple had to go to immigration court and could not afford his representation, they would not be granted legal counsel by the state. Their separation would be much more likely. He knows this. With the rest of his knowledge, which he exchanges for money, he'll grant them access to the law.

The waiting room is silent except for the faint whir of a large plasma screen mounted on the wall. Reclined in an ergonomic office chair, the armed guard watches a middle-aged man sell his grandfather's World War II uniform on a muted episode of
Pawn Stars
. He stares blankly at the high-definition imagery that flashes on the monitor. I avert my eyes because the rapid succession of hyper-saturated HD color irritates my eyes.

I scrawl “Adoration in Waiting” underneath my terrible
drawing because the young couple and their lawyer bring to mind those figures transfixed in religious adoration from High Renaissance art. I'd seen such an image a few months earlier that had broken something of itself off, lodged slivers of its furtive psychology, in my mind. I'd been walking through the J. Paul Getty Museum in a sort of torpor brought on by the excesses of the sprawling grounds: the precisely manicured topiary, the reverberation of my footsteps through the hollow corridors, the ornate galleries full of private riches. It wasn't immediately clear why the painting made such an impression, but after leaving it and winding through room upon room of opulent relics, I'd ended up back in front of it. Surrounded by luxury and light, the austerity of the painting provided a hole to sink into. I found myself sepulchered in Caspar's sinister gaze.

I wanted to take a photograph of the painting and its corresponding placard, so I casually turned in both directions looking for the guards who had been posted at the doorway, but they were gone. The plaque read “Adoration of the Magi.” The artist: Venetian painter Andrea Mantegna. The reliquary had emptied—I was alone—so I snapped three pictures, the last of which was a close-up of Caspar's pale face. His head was slightly tilted downward, mouth ajar, and eyes fixed on a far-off point. He looked like a caged animal that hadn't been fed for days, a fresh kill dangling somewhere in the distance. His look was lecherous and had such a draw that several weeks passed before I noticed the blessing bestowed by the Christ child while looking over my photographs of that day.

Looking at it for the second time made me feel claustrophobic. I was dropped into Caspar's perversion once again—his lust-filled eyes, his slightly open mouth. I was repulsed but nonetheless transfixed. It seemed illicit, blasphemous, that his agency commanded more of the frame than the Christ child's. Initially I'd been drawn to it because its characters weren't surrounded by opulence, like the other paintings lining
the walls, but instead buried in total darkness. Less a celebration of divinity born, it was a dark allegory luring me toward the fissures in the characters' inner lives.

In the waiting room in Des Moines the scene is more ambiguous, but I can't shake the feeling they're somehow related. Looking at the Department of Homeland Security seal evokes a familiar repulsion, one that wells up inside me when I'm in the vicinity of this kind of power. In the museum, Caspar seemed drunk at the potential outcome of his transaction: a precious Chinese cup to secure His grace, his conspicuous adoration—he a kneeling sovereign—in exchange for the keys to a higher kingdom. Mantegna was born on the cusp of an emerging order. In his time, Cosimo de' Medici would have established his bank as the official lending institution of the Catholic Church, skirting the divine ban on usury with an unprecedented system of leveraged finance. Shortly thereafter, the Medici bank would guarantee a lavish papal overdraft for which they would be granted the right to collect tithes.

Before the age of thirty, Mantegna would rise to prominence as court painter for the powerful Gonzaga family of Mantua, where he would live through the ascension of northern Italian cities as independent, international centers of commodity-based finance. He would witness the genuflection of feudal lords before bankers, the excommunication of clergy for not paying their debts, and the divine right of kings dissolve before a new logic. He and his patron, Ludovico II Gonzaga, a mercenary general, were at the vanguard of an emergent economic order that would dissolve the absolute power of kings and give way to new structures of power based on trade, finance, and capital in an economy and mode of governance growing to a new scale.

In the waiting room there are no kings, only the Department
of Homeland Security. The body of the sovereign, an easily identifiable locus of power, is absent, but the images are intrinsically linked in my mind. The old image by Mantegna, produced around 1500, reflects an empire teetering on the verge of modernity—a Europe hungry to supplant the transcendence of God with more earthly transactions. The scene in this room seems to exist on a continuum with that emergence. The four of us in this room wait seated before a disembodied authority, an authority allegedly diffused to all of us, handled through administrators and managers. The brown man might be the object of adoration in this waiting room because the state requires bodies to support it. In this North American context, Mexicans have served this purpose well. We've been used as disposable, malleable bodies that can be drawn in and purged according to labor demands and cyclical xenophobic trends.

If it is as I suspect, and the young couple's summons is for a marriage fraud interview, then they will be questioned by trained interrogators.

“What did you get your wife last Christmas?”

This might have been what their attorney was mouthing, possibly attempting to coach them through a scenario he thought was possible in the interview rooms. As their attorney, he must have already informed them that the process would end with the state granting or not granting their love written legitimacy, and that failure was a very real possibility.

“It would mean deportation,” he probably said in solemn tones, twiddling a pen nervously between his fingertips.

“It would mean being permanently barred from the country. You would never be able to adjust.”

He clarifies for good measure: “Never be able to come back.”

Acute ticks would have suddenly become audible, maybe from an old clock on the wall. Somewhere in his subconscious, the attorney would imagine what it would be like to
be under that kind of pressure. The young white lady would feel her face flush, feel her cheeks suddenly rush with heat. A line of perspiration would emerge and then begin to run down the channel of the attorney's back. His pale face would have turned bright red as he informed them that the state might ask questions about their partner's intimate clothing: what color, what cut, what size.

“Does your wife prefer boy shorts or thongs?”

“What kind of birth control do you use?”

If he's a thorough lawyer, he will let them know that if they're lucky, they'll get an investigator who's mostly disinterested and cold.

“Don't be surprised if they cut you off. That's good, just move on.”

He would explain the opposite scenario, the possibility of getting someone who believes himself or herself to be a gatekeeper, thinks he or she is doing good work, wakes up in the morning eager to make sure “America is secure.” Counsel's knuckles will turn white as he squeezes his pen, looks at his male client, and explains that in this situation the investigator will be crass, perhaps even vulgar—that he'll look smug at delicate moments, trying to provoke in him an emotional and volatile state.

“Tell me, does your wife have any distinguishing marks in places usually covered by clothes?”

Counsel will tell them they'll have to answer these kinds of questions.

“Remain calm. No matter what.”

The girl will look at her young husband, run her hand down the back of his head, fingering a fibrous line of scar tissue. She'll imagine his body suddenly jutting across a table, a hand grabbing at the investigator's face.

“Calm. No matter what.”

Inside the interview room, small bureaucrats are made insurmountable. It takes a minuscule reason, or no reason at all,
to raise suspicions about the authenticity of a marriage. The criteria the US Citizenship and Immigration Services use to determine whether a marriage is bona fide or not is vague and based on institutionally held normative models of marriage. I know at least one couple who would surely fail even though they've been married for over twenty years, because they've never lived in the same state, shared a bank account, or spent more than a couple of days a year together. And until very recently, when the federal government started recognizing same-sex unions, only heterosexual couples could be granted immigration relief through marriage. A few scribbled notes on a sheet of paper, a few boxes checked or unchecked, and the couple can formally be called a fraud, with little recourse to appeal. A few keystrokes and the young brown man will officially be categorized “removable,” and deportation proceedings might automatically be triggered.

The only people allowed in this second-floor waiting room are those on either end of this official USCIS business, so the particularities of this kind of administrative population control aren't widely seen. As I sit staring at the three of them, I wonder how many marriages between people I know would pass this test. I know my own parents probably stayed married during various rough periods in their relationship because they couldn't afford to get divorced or because they knew they wouldn't be able to sustain themselves financially without the other's income. How can an arrangement based on tangible, sometimes material needs be deemed fraudulent when that is exactly the basis of so many marriages, many of them happy and enduring?

The young man looks up, and at first I think he catches me staring at his wife, but he hasn't. He shoots me a reverse nod: one sudden upward jerk of the chin. It's a question that varies slightly with the forcefulness of the jerk. I know it means “qué pedo?” It could mean “qué pedo, cabrón?” but it doesn't. I shoot it back with an equal force, and now they
both mean hello—now it's the recognition of sharing something in common, because we both know that we know a substantial thing about the other simply by being in this room together. We stare at each other for a moment before we both turn away. It had been comfortable to place myself in the role of a spectator watching from a safe and comfortable distance, but I too was in this room, waiting to be evaluated and waiting to underwrite the legitimacy of the dehumanizing categories in which I have lived.

We are, of course, not in the same predicament. My presence here is more or less a formality, provided I'm not caught committing any felonies, certain misdemeanors, or any crimes of moral turpitude prior to the oath ceremony. I look down at the booklet in my right hand, the one I'd been given to study. On the cover Mount Rushmore dissolves into an undulating US flag. George Washington's stone face looks out beyond the horizon. I think about Mantegna, how his own desires may have been reflected in Caspar's expression, the slacked jaw, the downward tilt of his head, the lust in his eyes. Caspar looks upon the Christ child, understanding that his kingdom is for sale. When Mantegna made his painting, he and others like him had ascended to the kind of life previously reserved for royalty or clergy, but rather than signaling the dismantling of structures of power, as such, power simply adapted to a new world. It feels like we are living in a similar moment.

A young woman in a dressy pantsuit comes through a door that leads to a hallway beyond the waiting room. It's a hallway lined with cubicles in which the banal task of sorting populations is done through the orderly processing of forms, the evaluation of answers to standardized questions, and spreadsheet analysis. She calls the man's name. She smiles genuinely at him and holds the door as they enter.