In the past year, our apartment being under extreme stress, the shower started to leak through the downstairs light fitting, the walls began to flake, two doorknobs fell off and a third broke while I was in the bathroom, locking me in. By the time the landlord came up to jimmy it open, one of my housemates had pooped their pants in the hallway. I reemerged to find my savior holding the housemate’s offending pants in their hand, a bare butt absconding toward the deep pile carpet. Another time, the toilet being in short supply for a family of four, a housemate peed into a mixing bowl. All this to say, it shouldn’t have been a surprise when our landlord asked us to move out.
The Noodle Hubs had carried an enormous sparkly throw cushion out to the curb the day before. It lived on the kids' bunk bed and was sent to me by a PR person working for Preparation H. When I opened the box at work, I thought to myself with terror, what do they know? Then I remembered that I worked for the internet, which manifested at our desks in strange and unpredictable forms: cakes in the shape of a packet of Plan B, a combination Doritos-and-red-wine box, leaky bamboo diapers, a gigantic cushion printed to look like a croissant. I was once offered a CBD facial for “review purposes” out by Brighton Beach. When I arrived, the esthetician laid me on butcher’s paper, put a sheet of paper with a hole over my face, and painted the products into that circle. “Much less red,” she told me as I crinkled my ancient neck up off the table 45 minutes later. As free stuff went, the Preparation H pillow was not bad, so I brought it home on the subway and gave it to my kids.
What I didn’t know, of course, was that the pushing of the Preparation H pillow into the puckered opening of the large bin downstairs would be a prelude to our own departure. Our removal will happen piece by piece, a waterfall that starts with a single sparkly hemorrhoid cushion.
As it happened, the imperative to decide where to go — across the street or hundreds of miles elsewhere, not sure — coincided with my once-in-ten-years go through the turnstile at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to renew my green card.
The UN talks about migration “patterns” and “corridors,” as if humans were birds, or a river, but, like the immense flow of traffic through the Suez Canal, immigration is often out of view. Multiple news articles have mulled the possible relocation of Zac Efron to Byron Bay (“Bae”) in Australia, but the estimated 272 million other migrants worldwide tend to fly under the radar unless something goes terribly wrong. How quickly we forget that almost everyone is from somewhere else, and their ancestors from somewhere else before that (tangential: remember Irish Brad Pitt?). Two centuries back in time, an ancestor of mine is banished from Glasgow to Muwinina country, now Tasmania, for a crime; in the twenty-first century, I have my lungs x-rayed for tuberculosis out by the Denver airport, and subsequently learn the ways of America at a trivia night where a team by the name of Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head dominates week in and week out. These are the things Zillow doesn’t tell you when advertising a world of seamless relocation.
No matter where you are, you must admit that you might be elsewhere before long. (“This couldn’t be true! There was no way they could break through these walls to invade his life!” — Sherman Oakes in Bonfire of the Vanities.) What is a diaspora but you, your kids, and the others in the big daisy chain lighting cakes on fire because someone’s great great grandfather once lived in Cornwall? My kids can pinpoint where the rest of their Australian family live, know it’s a place you can get to by clambering into a plane and rattling up and over the great hump, coasting downhill like pigs to the market from Hawaii into Sydney. You are half this, I tell them, tapping the great southern pikelet, so they know it’s important. At breakfast the other day, Japhy came over to me and took a deep sniff. “You smell like Australia,” he said.
USCIS presides over the monumental symphony of global migration, but does so with the same paper tickets you get at the supermarket deli. I drove out to Borough Park in the south of Brooklyn, and found the application office under a BINGO wholesale market in an empty mini mall. Inside the office, there was a check-in desk with “Fulfilling America’s Promise” printed on a large vinyl banner over a stock image of a blurry American flag. What promise? Above the white linoleum tiles, there was no clue — no raised torch, no chiseled quote from Abraham Lincoln.
In my days as a seasonal worker, the first thing I used to see as I entered the U.S. through the tunnel at LAX was a “welcome” message below twin portraits of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney grinning terribly; this was the era in which you began to have to remove your shoes to enter the country; the era of “if you see something, say something”; the era in which the only real promise was that you couldn’t be trusted to fly without a member of the TSA running the back of their gloved hand in semi-circles along your underwire in a perfect mime of: boobs.
Down underneath BINGO, I was given number 96 and instructed to sit on one of twelve chairs spaced out like a Guess Who? board. As each person was called up, we had to stand up and move over one chair, a tiny soccer wave. The woman sitting next to me leaned over and said something.
“Beg your pardon?” I said.
“Do you speak Russian?” she asked.
“Oh, no, nyet, sorry,” I replied, wondering if I looked particularly Russian. Wondering if I knew any more Russian words. Nyet.
She smiled and turned her face back to the television, which was being fed a series of Spanish PSAs on e-verification by a combo VHS-DVD player on a wheelie stand.
A small boy picked a wedgie as his father led him into a cubicle to have his fingerprints taken. Next, an elderly lady was shadowed into hers by a middle-aged daughter. “Where’s your green card?” a staff member said with annoyance to a man with a maroon passport. The rest of us sat obediently with our tickets.
I had the jokes ready — “I’ve enjoyed my free trial of America, and I’d like to renew my subscription” — but when it was my turn, I behaved. “WAIT,” said the officer when I tried to ask him if I could ask a question. He rolled my fingers around on a glass scanner like hot dogs — they like you to hand your fingers limply over as though they aren’t attached — then stamped my application, with no further word on how long things might take.
That night, Japhy pushed the door open into our room sometime in the early hours of the morning, the room still black. He wanted his water bottle refilled, so I took it into the kitchen then found my way back. He had switched pillow ends and the planets dangling over him from the bunk above were glowing lemon-lime. They were a present from his Australian cousins, and we’ve held them in front of the lamp before bedtime but they never give off much of a glow. At 4 a.m., they lit spot fires on my retinas. In the neon fog, I heard John Farnham, I heard Christine Anu, I saw netball vests, people in paper crowns eating prawns on Christmas day, saw puds on fire. Maybe they don’t start to glow until the Australian moon rises.
We are open to ideas for where to live! Would love somewhere with two toilets. Or a yard! Or three toilets.
How do you know where to go?!!
How it happened
Baseball fan gets his first batting helmet, won’t take it off. PUT HIM IN, COACH:
Goodies
I was reminded of Mike Kelley’s kandors — cities on Superman’s home planet, each in its own bell jar.
Great guest essay on Evil Witches today by Jeanie Chung.
“We know little for certain about the peregrini. … These men were in search not of material gain, but of a hallowed landscape: one that would sharpen their faith to its utmost point. They were, in the phrasing of their own theology, exiles looking for Terra Repromissionis Sanctorum — the Promised Land of Saints. A long Christian tradition exists that considers all individuals as peregrini, in that all human life is seen as an exile.” — from The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane.
“In living memory has there ever been anything so big and so small? As big as falling walls and towers, as small as running out of Weetabix. At the time of writing, we in the UK are still in the somewhat spirited but baffled early phase of isolation. We are applauding our NHS on doorsteps and balconies while Prince Charles and Boris Johnson clap along, hours before succumbing to the invisible flood.” — Russell Brand from last year, and while I never read My Booky Wooky, I continue to appreciate the title.
John Lanchester on the gargantuanisation of ships and true dimensions of globalism in LRB: “The resulting structures are Russian dolls of legal impunity, and abuses are so rife they almost aren’t abuses, but a terrible norm. As Rose George puts it, ‘who do you complain to, when you are employed by a Manila manning agency on a ship owned by an American, flagged by Panama, and managed by a Cypriot, in international waters?’ And that is a simple story by the standards of contemporary shipping.”
The latest Zoom-related resignation, this time at The Believer: “Shenk was soaking in a bathtub with Epsom salts during the meeting to alleviate nerve pain caused by fibromyalgia. He had chosen a virtual background to mask his location and had worn a mesh shirt. When Shenk’s computer battery died, he got up to plug it in, believing the camera was off. But the video kept running.” RUH ROH.
And oh dear this only got funnier for me:
Thank you for reading KAFKA’S BABY!! <3 <3 <3 As always, I would love to hear from you!
Good luck house-hunting! If you stay put and still feel the itch, you can house swap with me in Savannah. It's hot as Hades in the summer but beautiful and near the beach. You can see if it's really "the next Brooklyn", like some Vogue.com clickbait said a few years ago that had all the local op-ed writers up in arms, while I see the actual Brooklyn lol
Can I tempt you to the dark side ie Jersey burbs?!