You have been granted an immigrant visa for extraordinary achievement, you do not need to pass an interview with Immigration, the officer outside the first floor of the Department of Homeland Security says. Do you understand? Do you speak English?
I do.
Then why are you here since you don’t need to be? she asks again, perusing my documents.
To petition for advance parole, I grimace ruefully. Advance parole is a legal construct, an exemption from the rule that says no one can leave and reenter the US while their status is pending. If Immigration grants you this exemption, it means that even if you travel outside the U.S., in the eyes of the law you are still, you are always, here.
The rectangular room’s walls are filled with posters of happy people of all races and ethnicities, genders and ages, smiling in the sunshine, holding babies on their laps and little children by the hand, everyone looking happy in a wholesome, productive, fecund way. We are all immigrants, it says. Welcome to America!
On all four sides of the room, there are officials sitting in little booths. The booths are really school-desks, separated by thin plastic divides.
If you have come so far in the process, the set-up implies, you are not dangerous. You are almost one of us.
I take a number and sit down on one of the chairs placed in three rows in the middle of the room. It feels strange being in the middle, as if I am under surreptitious observation. But no one seems intent on doing that. The Immigration officers in the cubicles seem tired. The few people waiting to be interviewed look bored, covertly mutinous, wary. Everyone in the room looks as if they would like to be elsewhere. The day is too hot, one of those late-July Fridays when New York seems like an abandoned tropical city.
I check my answers on the four-page USCIS questionnaire that I have to submit, for the hundredth time, among other documentation:
Have you ever perpetrated war crimes or genocide? Have you ever engaged in terrorism or prostitution? Have you ever been a member of the Nazi or Communist Party? Have you ever committed a crime you have never been accused of? No. No. No. No.
7024: Booth 2. My number flashes on the electronic board high on the right wall of the room.
Although this is an encounter I have requested, I can feel my body fibrillating as I rise. In times of great distress, my mother used to say, my soul is trembling. Now I understand what she means. In Greek, engaging with authorities when you don’t need to is called walking up to the mouth of the wolf.
A woman around 55, African-American, with long dreadlocks, dressed in a white shirt and black pants awaits me in Booth 2. She looks strong, capable, no-nonsense. She gestures towards the chair. Please take a seat.
I perch on the side of the chair, regretting my presence there, wishing I could take flight.
The woman scrutinizes me, her eyes alert and experienced. I have the feeling she is like a human MRI scanner, seeing through any posturing or dissembling.
She sifts through my paperwork, then turns her attention to the computer, perusing my electronic file. She takes her time. I start breathing too quickly, afraid she can discern my fear.
So, you’re here because you want to travel while you’re out of status as a non-immigrant, but not yet in status as a legal permanent resident?
Couched in these terms, yes, my request does sound both hubristic and ridiculous.
Um, yes, I gulp. In ancient Greek tragedy, people sometimes commit hubris not out of arrogance but because they are trying to do the right thing for the person they love. “Antigone”, Sophocles’ tragedy, ends with the words: Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness. I hope my ancestors were wrong. I hope love is the supreme part of happiness, even though there are many signs that I may be the one who’s wrong.
Where do you want to go? the officer asks.
Athens, Greece.
Where is that? Africa or Asia?
Europe, I say, Southeastern Europe. Greece.
I don’t know this place.
The ancient Greek gods? Homer? Odysseus? The Euclid in Euclid Avenue? Greek yogurt? The Acropolis? The Greek financial crisis? Mykonos? Santorini? Socrates? Alexander the Great? “Mama Mia”? I cannot believe I’m offering the country up as the sum of its clichés so that it, and therefore I too, can be seen.
I have no idea what you are talking about, the woman says. People here come from everywhere. I cannot know every single country in the world. I work all day and then I have my life at home—my son, the community garden, the local bookclub.
Yes, of course, of course, I nod vehemently.
Okay. So what’s there? Why do you want to go to this place? And why is it an emergency?
Well, I propel my explanatory documents towards her. I have a meeting there with old media contacts… and, um, a politician I used to write speeches for, and…
Uh-huh. Her gaze indicates supreme indifference.
It’s the place I left to come here. Perhaps I shouldn’t have.
She stares at me, a flicker of surprise escaping the practiced impassive gaze.
My mother is there. She’s entirely alone now—we have no other family. At the moment she’s not well, even though she doesn’t admit it.
The Immigration officer lifts her head from the file and looks at me. Got it. Your mom. Moms are everything. OK, honey, let’s make it happen!
For the next few minutes, she concentrates on generating a small mound of paperwork meant to send me away and then usher me back into the U.S.—back home, she says– past borders, controls, and all the boundaries I have spent my life unintentionally breaking.
Finally, after a short frenzy of stamping, she signs her name with a flourish, hands me the papers. Done!
At the risk of offending her, I press my case. Are you sure these papers are enough? I’ll be free to leave the U.S.? And then I’ll be free to return?
That’s a whole lot of freedom you’re wanting. Dangerous stuff! She grins. Don’t worry. You’ll go to Greece and then return without a problem. If you have any, absolutely any trouble at the airport, tell Border Control to give me a call, I’ll deal with it.
Are you sure?
The officer morphs into my therapist. Honey. I understand you have gone through a lot to get here. But listen to me! It’s going to be okay—and if it isn’t, they’ll call me.
I look at the papers meant for Border Control. Under her signature it says: Head of Immigration, Department of Homeland Security for New York City. She has also included her phone number.
I know how it is. I’m really close to my mother, she smiles.
For a moment the border between immigrant and Immigration officer is lifted.
Returning home, I find two women conversing on the building’s stoop, a huge Insomnia Cookies paper bag between them.
It was such a perfect day, says one of the women to the other. There was a sense of everything beginning again.
Two days before my departure to Athens, my landlady pays me a visit. I have made the mistake of telling her I am leaving to go to Greece.
Excellent! she says. There is a woman from Sweden to whom I can sublet the apartment for two weeks while you will be gone. This suits me perfectly.
But it’s my home! I protest. We just renewed the lease. I have already paid you this month’s rent. All my stuff is inside.
I can put your stuff in the basement.
But it’s my apartment!
Well it’s mine, actually.
You want to collect rent from me and at the same time AirBnB it to someone else?
Yeah! Why do you mind what will happen when you’re away? You’d be doing me a nice favor.
Please. Please don’t take advantage of the fact that I’m an immigrant and can’t afford conflict.
She stops pressing. It’s the word “immigrant” that affects her, I think. Her grandparents were refugees to the U.S. She is not too close to the immigrant experience to want to close the door behind her, nor is she yet so detached from it that she doesn’t care she doesn’t care. Still. The summer in New York is so hot it can melt good intentions.
On the day of my flight, my mother texts: My love, please, do not even think of coming here. They won’t let you reenter the U.S. Everything you have gone through will have been for nothing if you come. It is crazy to even think of leaving the U.S. while you’re out of status and your green card is pending.
Walking toward the departure gate, after airport security at JFK, I feel devastated at leaving.
On the plane, halfway across the Atlantic, between lives, continents, past and present, as the plastic knife I try to peel an orange with breaks, the memory of my grandmother returns to me, strong as a physical presence. Her sweet smell, soap made of freshly pressed flowers and glycerin, fills me. She was born in a place that once belonged to Greece, then the Ottoman Empire, then Italy, then Bulgaria, now again, Greece. Her family were local gentry: magnanimous toward the poor families in their community, but treating their own daughters like property. She grew up to be different from her family in every way but her style and manners. To my infinite embarassment she’d lay out embroidered linen tablecloths, silverware and crystal glasses in the dining room for dinner when I returned home from school. She’d eat apples, oranges, even pizza, with a fork and knife. Whenever I tried to eat oranges her way, they’d go skidding across the plates, the table, the room, breaking things.
Eleven hours later, I cross the thin gray line that delineates the border at the airport in Athens. The gate opens. I embrace my mother.
And now I am walking down the same old street as always. Avoiding the same old manhole on the left side of the curb. Railing against the same old priests of the nearby church for attaching stadium-quality amplifiers to the church bells, yet another meaningless play for power. Everything is the same, nothing is the same—myself included. In the center of Athens, the U.S. Embassy has expanded even more, turning a greater part of Freedom Park into concrete blocks, spikes, high walls.
I spend days dodging ghosts from the past passing me by on the streets, specters of what had been and might have been.
My dog is delighted to see me. Even though the Alzheimer’s has erased his mind, he remembers me. In the days I am there, he never leaves my side. He stops making messes inside the house. He eats with great appetite, but only from my hand. We both know we will never see each other again. I weep into his neck, dampening his fur. He licks me soothingly. The vet calls it a miracle. I find a clinical study suggesting that intense emotion can activate engram cells, the physical memories that engender permanent changes in the brain, thus recouping lost memories.
When you left, you broke his heart, my mother says, but thankfully for him, most days he can’t remember it.
When did I become the kind of person who does this, who can bear it?
A plane rises in the sky.
In time, the New York City skyline swings into view, gleaming like a temple illuminated by the presence of an unknown god.
The Airtrain leads to the E, then the C subway train, then I emerge, back in the city. “Lord Make Me Rich And Then Sane”, a homeless woman in the station holds a sign people look at wistfully. Outside, dozens of people are crossing the street dancing, a silent disco party. It must have rained recently: the streets are clean, covered by wet leaves. They seem to radiate my love for this place and my love for my mother, and her love for me, who loves this place. A quality of love that stretches out across time, distance, pain, embracing continents and countries.
In Greek myths, chimeras are monstrous fire-breathing hybrid of multiple animals. In biology, chimeras are people with two totally different sets of DNA inside their body. They can be twins who have exchanged cells when they’re in the womb, mothers who have absorbed cells from the children they carried, lovers in whom passion has rendered epigenetic changes.
In New York, and throughout the United States, millions of us are like chimeras, carrying within us pieces of past, non-American lives, lives that the engrams in our minds have rendered secondary to this American life. It’s an act of love to believe in something you do not know and can in no way control. It’s an act of faith to love beyond what you belong to and what belongs to you. It’s an act of grace to become and be accepted as part of a place, a nation, an idea, which you loved even as a stranger.
