The INS office in Memphis is on Summer Avenue. Summer is a long street. It runs west all the way to Parkway North and the river, and to the east it goes all the way to Lakeland, and beyond. They both knew the street without being able to tell from the number exactly where the office might be. Their appointment was for eight-thirty a.m.
He woke just before eight o’clock. He got out of the bed and went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror.
Then he looked at the clock on the wall to his left.
Rita woke to the sound of him moving through the house. They hurried into their clothes, barely speaking, and by eight-sixteen they were in the car, with him driving, speeding toward Highway 240, which was the shortest way to Summer. Neither of them spoke. They didn’t know which way to turn on Summer. He thought she had looked it up, and she thought he had.
“It’s your responsibility,” she told him. “I thought you’d do it.”
“Call them,” he said. “Can you do that?”
“Why didn’t you get up with the alarm?”
“I thought you were up. You were up.”
“I had a bad night. I couldn’t sleep. Christ. Sue me.”
“Where were you?”
“I fell asleep in the chair.”
“Call them. We’re almost to the exit.”
She keyed in the number, and got a recording, with choices. She had to scroll through them. He pulled over on the clover-leaf that would take them down to the light at Summer. Right would be west, left would be east.
She keyed angrily—sighing with exasperation and muttering under her breath—through the choices. And finally she was speaking to someone. He looked out at the highway and the parking lot of Garden Ridge Home Store, the drive-in theater screen beyond. The appointment form stated unequivocally that if a petitioner was late, the appointment would be canceled and all forms would become invalid. The entire process of seeking the card would have to be repeated. He tapped the wheel, listening to her.
She said, “We’re at the 240 interchange. The light there.”
“Take a left at the light,” said the voice on the telephone, “and then take the first right and go to the end of the drive. We’re right there.”
“Thank you,” Rita said. She snapped the phone shut. “We’re in luck.”
“I heard.” He was already pulling the car out, but the blare of a truck horn stopped him. He slammed on the brake and she pitched forward. The folders on her lap fell to the floor at her feet.
He watched the truck, a big semi-trailer, go on past, down to the light. He looked back and carefully pulled out. He knew she was displeased with him. She hadn’t reached to retrieve the folders.
“You’re the one that fell asleep in the chair.”
“It’s your permanent residency. You’d think that would make you a little concerned for the details—like where the office is.”
“We’re in luck,” he said. “Remember?”
The sound that came from her was not a word.
“Could you repeat that, please?”
“If you only had one—one—just one organizational gene.”
“What would I do in that case? I would seek you out dead asleep in a chair in the living room when you’re supposed to be getting ready for this appointment?”
“You just turned over and went back to sleep.”
“I was depending on my lady,” he said.
“Don’t call me that. Your father calls your mother that.”
“You thought it was charming when we were there.”
“I thought it was sweet for them, since they’re so unhappy and generally miserable with each other and in such obvious pain.”
“Pain?” he said.
“Go,” she told him.
The truck had pulled into the intersection and was also turning left. He idled forward, keeping a good distance behind it. “I don’t know if I want a permanent residency here.”
“Well, turn around then. Let’s go home. You can go back to Ireland.”
He pulled out around the truck and into the gas station there, and turned around, so that the car was facing Summer from the other side.
“What’re you doing?” she said.
“You want to go home. Sure, and I can go home, too. I thought they were one and the same, but I see they’re not.”
“Just please stop this. I didn’t mean it. We’re going to be late.”
“You said, Let’s go home. And what’s this about my mum and dad now?”
“We’ve got five minutes to get there, Michael. Do you want to go through the whole thing again?”
“Maybe I don’t want to go through it now.”
“You said they’re miserable together.”
“So they’re to be pitied now, and you can’t think of them except as something hostile to your well-being.”
She looked out of the window and didn’t answer. He made the right turn, and then the next right, and followed the drive to the building—a low gray institutional-looking place with aluminum-and-glass doors. She gathered what had fallen to the floor while he waited. Neither of them spoke. He watched her struggle with the papers. Finally she had it together, and they got out of the car. The heat of the morning had begun to bake the asphalt lot, and the air smelled heavily of creosote. She looked over the roof of the car at him, her face drawn and tired, already gleaming with sweat.
“Don’t worry,” he said to her. “We’ll play the fuck’n love card.”
“I didn’t mean anything about your parents.” Her expression was broken; he thought she might begin to cry, but then he reflected that she had brought it on herself with those cruel comments about two people who had taken her into their home and welcomed her to the family. He felt low and mean, but he was still angry, and he walked a couple of paces behind her, looking at the backs of her ankles against the cream white of her shoes and the blue cuffs of her slacks. His wife. He remembered being with her in a little tall-ceilinged room off the Piazza Navona, the two of them staring out at a rainy morning, the beginning of their life together, and she was talking with excitement about the Bernini in the center of the piazza, and he had turned to kiss her, a long sweet kiss, and when it was over she continued, without having lost the thought, a pretty girl still telling, still going on about her thrilling journey in the ancient town. It had charmed him so completely that he almost wept for the joy of it.
Now he opened the door of the ugly, single-floored building—it looked like a converted trailer—and held it, and walked in after her. This was a foyer leading to another glass-and-aluminum door. It had occurred to him that there was something unreasonable about his anger. He could feel himself holding on to it while opening that door for her. He dismissed the idea; he was certain that he was right about this morning. She was the one who had been unreasonable. He thought of his parents, saw his father sulking and seething over a plate of sausages, while the woman he had lived with all those years kept to her side of the table in silence.
There was a guard inside the inner door. They had to empty their pockets into a basket and step through a metal detector. The guard, a heavyset brown man with a permanent frown that showed even as he smiled, looked at their driver’s licenses and then waved them into the room. Chairs were set in rows on one side. Five other people were there—a woman and two toddlers who looked to be twins, and a very young couple, teenagers. Everyone sat quietly, except the toddlers, who kept pulling against their mother, wanting out of her grasp. Another couple walked out of the central door, and the clerk there, a tall blond woman with very red lipstick, said “Mr. and Mrs. O’Keefe.”
So they were on time, and if they had waited another minute, this woman would have called someone else. Rita thought of the tremendous overweening punctiliousness of this agency of the government—a reaction to 9/11, no doubt. The thought went through her as she followed the woman down a narrow hall and into a small office. On the desk was a computer, several pictures of the woman’s children, and a t
all stack of folders. Rita set her own folders on the desk.
The woman took their file from the stack and opened it. She used the eraser end of a pencil as friction to riffle through the pages. She asked for their passports and driver’s licenses. Rita also had both birth certificates, and she handed them over.
“Do you have your marriage license?”
“Yes.” She began looking through the folders on her side of the desk. “I’m sure I have it here somewhere.”
The woman waited. Michael looked around the room, and his wife’s little exasperated sigh told him that she wasn’t finding the thing. “Maybe it’s still in the car,” he said.
“I packed it,” said Rita. “I put it right in here.”
“But the folders all fell on the floor when I had to slam on the brakes. Maybe you didn’t get it when you picked it all up.”
“Here,” Rita said, pulling it out of the middle of the stack. “It got pushed in under some things. We almost had an accident coming here.”
“Oh.” The woman took the license and gazed at it. “You’ve been together… a year and two months.”
“We’ve been together longer than that,” Rita said. “We’ve been married a year and two months.”
“You got married here in Tennessee.”
“Yes.”
“Do you have children yet?”
“No,” said Rita. And suddenly a little sob rose up from the back of her throat. She was completely unready for it. She held the next breath back, feeling her throat close. Out of the corner of her eye she could see his face turned to her.
The woman had reached across to hand the license back, and she was frozen for a few awkward seconds, holding it out. Michael reached over and took it from her, and set it on the folder in front of Rita.
“Do you need some time?” the woman asked.
“Excuse me,” Rita said, reaching into her purse and bringing out a handkerchief. She held it to her mouth. “I’m sorry.” It wouldn’t stop. She couldn’t make it stop. She wiped her eyes, closed them tight, and sobbed.
The woman looked at Michael, who could only stare back. Perhaps he shrugged. And then he understood that she was expecting him to do something, to show some concern. He put his hand out and touched Rita’s shaking shoulder. “There,” he said.
“I don’t know what’s happened,” Rita got out. But then it came over her again in a wave, and she sat crying, now at least partly because of the fact itself—that she couldn’t control it, make it stop.
Michael said, “We almost had an accident coming over here.”
“I’ll be back,” the woman said. She rose, looking taller than he had remembered from first seeing her. She went out of the office and closed the door quietly.
He leaned over and said, “I’m sorry. Don’t cry.”
“I said that awful thing about your father and mother.”
“I’ve said worse meself. Don’t do this. Don’t torture yourself.” He was worried about the woman coming back. He searched his mind for something soothing to say, and his mind was blank. Again he saw her ankles, the white shoes, the pretty slacks. He felt a rush of affection for her and briefly it was as if he were looking at a child crying about some small thing.
“It’s a wee thing,” he said. “The lady’ll understand. Don’t worry.”
“I’m fine,” she said, resisting the thought that he really didn’t know anything at all about her. “I love you.” But she couldn’t feel it just now, with him sitting there staring, his face white with embarrassment. Oh, how did people do it? How did they go from one place to another, and find some way to be happy? And she had been happy, so happy. And there would be children, that would come. They were together. A married couple in America. She thought of her mother and father, who had seemed so content all those years, and whose divorce had made her wish for something overwhelming to come, to make them see what they were to each other, to make them hold on to it better than they had. And she was not going to have a life like theirs, not going to lie about anything to anyone, not going to deceive herself. She took Michael’s hand, reached for it, and looked into his green eyes, sniffling, gaining some control again. “I love you,” she said, meaning it without quite feeling it.
“There,” he repeated. “It’s all right. It’s going to be fine, you’ll see. Nothing to worry about. I love you, too.”
“I know,” she told him. It was just that the truck had startled her so, and the morning itself had been upsetting. Things would be all right, would return to normal. She had packed the marriage license. All the other papers were in order. They were not terrorists, after all. He was going to get his permanent residency card. He would be able to stay as long as he wanted to.
SIXTY-FIVE MILLION YEARS
Because this was such a small parish, Father Hennessey knew many of the people who came to confess, and he was afraid that when he saw them on his daily rounds it might show in his face that their troubles and failures had lately, in spite of all his efforts to resist, been relegated to some zone of apathy in his heart. It was as if some part of him had come loose, and was in revolt.
His hours in the booth were an almost unbearable ordeal now.
The voices, one by one, murmured, droned, went on flatly in the confidence that what was being confessed was of interest—and through the long minutes he tried unsuccessfully to concentrate on the catalog of little cruelties, omissions, vanities, impure thoughts, petty indulgences, hatreds and angers, curses and unchecked passions of his completely ordinary parishioners.
He felt nothing. It was all the dread sameness of the self, all the old, recurring failures of control, the same rapacious desires, the same renegade appetites. Over and over and over.
But even beyond the worry about appearances, Father Hennessey was profoundly worried about the sensation itself. This spiritual lethargy, this torpor, this desolation—what other word could you use to describe it?—followed him into the restless nights. There were prayers and exercises to combat spiritual dryness, but nothing worked.
He spent the hours after confession on his knees, in his room, saying his office, and enduring the discomfort of the hard wooden floor. He took to denying himself his lunch, and often in the evenings he retired without drinking any water or juice, though the medicines he was taking for his arthritic hip gave him dry mouth. And he forfeited the little pleasurable habits that had formed over the years—the sip of cognac before bed; the occasional ice cream cone after dinner, Saturday- and Sunday-afternoon golf on television.
One evening, toward the end of his purgatory in the booth, after more than an hour of morbid anticipation that he might fall asleep, he closed one panel and opened the other to discover a young male voice that seemed already to have been talking: “Father, the dinosaurs lived here for millions of years. We’ve only been here for a little fraction of a second in terms of evolution. What was God thinking?”
Father Hennessey straightened and looked at the shape on the other side of the screen. “Yes?” he said. Then: “Begin again, please, son.”
“Well, I don’t get it.”
“Tell me what you don’t get.”
“I don’t get the millions of years. Millions of years, Father. What was he thinking?”
“How old are you?” Father Hennessey asked. “Almost fifteen.”
He began to talk about God’s time being different from human time.
The boy interrupted him. “Yes, Father, but more than sixty million years.” There was an urgency in the voice; perhaps it was desperation.
“Son, remember the words of Saint Peter. ‘Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief.’”
“I know that one, Father. I know all that stuff. I spent a year in bed and there wasn’t anything to do but read.”
“I’m sorry,” said the priest, because he could think of nothing else to say for the moment. But then he added, “If Saint Peter could doubt, think how much easier it is for us to fall into it.”
“But he didn’t kn
ow about the dinosaurs and the sixty million plus years.”
“You don’t know that—do you? You don’t know that for sure.”
“Saint Peter didn’t know about the dinosaurs, Father.”
The insistence in the voice annoyed him. He said, “We don’t know that he didn’t. We have no exact knowledge of that. There is no mention of it—although God himself mentions Leviathan in the Book of Job.”
“I know that one, too,” said the voice. “I read that one, too. He asks Job if he can draw the whale up out of the deep. He’s bragging. It’s a piece of petty belligerence.”
“How old did you say you are?”
“I read a lot. I told you, I spent a year in bed. Juvenile RA. You know what that is?”
“Arthritis?”
“Rheumatoid. Yes. I got it two years ago. I missed a year of school. They thought I had leukemia.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It’s just my sister and me now.”
Father Hennessey wanted to ask the name. He searched through the faces he could call up, the boys he knew. “Have you ever come to me before?” he said.
“I live with my sister. Our mother’s in the hospital and she’s the one who—well, no, I want to know. I want to know the answers to these questions.”
“These are her questions, then.”
“They’re mine,” the boy said. “I want to know.”
“Are you from this parish?” He waited. But the shape was still; there was just the down-turning shadow of the profile. He saw a large, crooked nose, a round head—evidently the hair was cut very close to the scalp. “Well, are you?”
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
Silence.
The priest murmured, “Yes?”
Nothing.
“Is there anything else you wish to confess?”
“Did he say, ‘Let there be lizards?’ Did he say, ‘No voices, no music, no thoughts, no yearning for divine light. Just these big ugly scaly things roaring and grunting and eating each other or chewing up the vegetation?’ What did he make them for? Could he have found them beautiful?”
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