Joggers, bikers, street signs, picket fences, mailboxes, a bun missing its inner hot dog, stubby shadows cast in unison, shadows bearing short necks, jowls nascent, the presence of perpetual possible jowl on the swarming street. I thought about the ubiquitous loose skin common among white collar workers. Markets boomed for chin and jaw implants.
In the elevator that felt like an escape, inside the pocket of mechanized silence stood an immigration attorney whose jaw prospered suddenly over the Thanksgiving holiday.
I wrote it off as a business expense, he said. He meant business.
What’s business? A clerk whispered. As if a clerk occupied a position to ask anything apart from rhetorical questions.
The sound of paper shuffling, penny loafers dragging across a carpet.
A strong jawline is statistically linked to higher levels of respect and deference in social situations. Studies show. Such thoughts lead to kipper snacks, stale crackers, and alcohol.
The attorney adjusted his pant leg which had bunched up near the calf, turned to a magenta-clad girl on my left, inquired about her country of origin. Things happen so quickly when it’s cordial.
Ada Kaleh, she said, then added, hesitantly, Turkey.
I knew nothing about Ada Kaleh. The swift Google searches described it as an island dividing the stream of the Danube. A historic outpost for Turkish invaders and not the sort of place from which one might originate.
The attorney nodded knowingly and asked if she was Jewish.
The Turkish girl shrugged, magenta blousing with her shoulders. Maybe. But there was no way to prove it. No way to prove anything being from the Balkans, her genes stacked high over centuries. She likened it to Babylon, shrugged again.
Men in tailored suits found complex pretexts to absorb her ass with their beady eyes, their pupils scrambling like cotton over barbed wire fences. Mostly blue eyes, she found.
Are you going to the subway? The attorney persisted.
No. She avoided the subway. The places she got off included neighborhoods with run-down metal playgrounds and abandoned food trucks, stops where fellow passengers burrowed their heads into books or newspapers, pretending not to notice. As if she cared.
She wasn’t from around here so why would she care? She didn’t care. She knew what humming hid. And now this immigration attorney probing her ethnic status as if blood was the best guarantee of political asylum.
Do you speak Russian?
Do you speak Hebrew?
Do you speak Turkish?
Do you speak Bosnian?
Are you a Croat?
How long have you been alive?
How far back can you trace your ancestors?
The nation-state rose and fell like a wind tunnel of plastic grocery bags in the park square. She swatted a fly from her nose. No, she hadn’t been trafficked. She loathed the loaded words he wedged against her.
When in Rome, I speak Italian. She lifted her voice at the end of the statement as she’d observed American women doing when speaking to men. Was she flippant? She had watched soda commercials where females spoke flippantly in a very convincing manner. American men watched those commercials as well, given how much television they watched, given how hard it is to avoid it. From the girth of his midline, she surmised the attorney purchased advertised sodas. The way he watched the numbers light up screamed consumer.
Do you have any special skills that would make you valuable to this country?
Do you do gymnastics or ballet?
Do you have extended family in the States?
She had nothing except a handgun she’d stolen from a man three nights ago. The plan was to pawn it for cash. Guns were worth more than gold to these people.
Was entrepreneurship a marketable asset? She had experience with being entrepreneurial.
Did she have a boyfriend or significant other that could vouch for her character?
There was Ralph, a midwestern trope, a guy that appeared on her cafe horizon and settled in like a foreign flu pandemic. They’d been sleeping together for five months. And felt like forever. Did that count for something– the feeling opposite the data?
Having interned at Wired, Ralph fashioned himself a latter-day prophet for the coming noospheres, an impresario of techno-sexy. She hadn’t seen it before but she knew it wasn’t earnest. Like frequent hip, middling techie-crats, Ralph abandoned the concept of personal identity for the premise that forms follows function.
We descended from the elevator at the first floor and positioned ourselves on puffy vinyl chairs in the lobby, surrounded by glass, small waterfalls gurgling to the left of the seating area, a Japanese listening garden. I had nothing better to do that overhear them.
The lawyer: asking about gainful employment.
The vaguely Turkish girl: admitting to a series of odd jobs.
The water and falling labor market.
Maybe I can help you, the attorney saying in a solemn but uncertain fashion.
Maybe she could help him in return; maybe leverage the banality of modern marriage, three American children, an anxiety-riddled wife.
The book I’m pretending to read while listening is published by Dalkey.
The girl and the attorney consulting their schedules via iphone.
The author, Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro, says Americans are bad at sex: “Imagine a people that thinks God and Jesus are dirty words, all of it can be traced back to their Puritanism, using His name in vain and the like.”
Folks from all over the world seeking asylum in this country, seeking justice from my fellow Americans, believing a dream comprised of a people that shortens the Jesus to Jeez and feels holier for it.
# # #
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Alabama. Find her poems and prose in recent issues of Juked, DIAGRAM, Mantis, VOLT, Cloudbank, New Orleans Review Online, and others. Her first fiction collection, ‘Every Mask I Tried On’, won the 2016 Brighthorse Books Prize and is forthcoming from Brighthorse Books this year. She can’t wait for you to read it. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com
.
Photo:Alex Iby
