The Weight of Shadows (15 page)

Later that evening, after not being able to stop thinking about Intramuros, I slip into a torpor that clouds my thoughts. I lie on the large king-size bed in the sleek hotel suite in which Jeremiah and I are rooming, feeling uneasy. I decide to go for a walk to try to clear my mind, but it takes me about an hour to pry myself from the dim room. As I exit the hotel there are people eating dinner outdoors on elegantly stark tables that run along the exterior. I light a cigarette, and a tall, lean European man wearing brown suede loafers approaches. He asks me for a cigarette in English spoken with a thick French accent. I ask him how he knew to speak to me in English. He smiles. “Lucky guess.”

Returning to the United States after having been gone for over a month is disorienting. It feels like entering a foreign country, but it also feels as though I'd never left. Throughout Southeast Asia I'd had encounters with things that were truly foreign to me—bits of culture that were completely unrecognizable—but they were always set within a periphery that was eerily familiar. In the Philippines the colorful, squat Jeepneys that are everywhere first struck me as wholly Filipino cultural objects until someone pointed out that their name came from the US military Jeep that had become ubiquitous during American aggression and occupation. Many of the first-generation Jeepneys had been tricked-out, military surplus Jeeps that were sold to Filipinos after they'd served their purpose. I'd also gone to Cambodia, and as soon as I deplaned there, I noticed an airport employee walking with a wooden crutch because he was missing his right leg from the knee down. I didn't think anything of it until I arrived at my hotel where there was a young man playing a khim in the lobby. He sat on the floor with his legs pointed behind him, and I almost missed seeing that he too was missing the bottom half of a leg, but his was the left. Somehow the connection evaded me until a few hours later, after a much-needed nap and shower, when I had dinner in the empty
hotel restaurant. Sitting in silence at Le Bistrot, I awaited a large platter of escargot, and it wasn't until the waiter, a dark brown Cambodian man in his twenties, set the dish down that I realized that seeing two men with missing bottom extremities had not been a coincidence. I remembered bits of what I knew of the international meddling after Cambodia had gained its independence from France, the series of US bombings during the sixties and seventies, and the rise of the Khmer Rouge. For the rest of the meal I thought about a countryside littered with land mines and mass graves.

Upon landing in the United States I check my email after not having checked it for a couple of weeks. One of the first messages is from my landlord, who'd been collecting my mail while I was gone. He wrote that I'd gotten a certified letter from the Department of Homeland Security, and he wanted to know if he should forward it to my parents' place in Chicago. On my layover I call him and asked him to read it to me, which he does. It contains the details for my oath ceremony, which he says is tomorrow, so after flying from Bangkok to Los Angeles, and then from Los Angeles to Chicago, I borrow a friend's car and take off for Iowa City.

I zone in and out of driving because I haven't slept and there are only intermittent cars after long stretches of nothing. For dozens of miles there is only the rhythm of the yellow lines on the triangles of black asphalt made visible by the headlights. I lose track of the fact I've been driving for long periods, so when I am finally present again it's scary that I don't remember the last ten or twenty minutes of steering the vehicle at eighty miles an hour. I mostly daydream about Iowa, about how strange it is that after having lived in Chicago for over two decades, the place where I'd be naturalized would be West Branch, Iowa, a city with a population of just over two thousand, to which I have never even been. I think about the life-sized butter cow at the Iowa State Fair, about the National Cattle Congress, about
politicians making pilgrimages to the heartland for down-home footage, about the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, and about the plaque in Riverside that looks like a headstone and reads “FUTURE BIRTHPLACE OF CAPTAIN JAMES T. KIRK, MARCH 22, 2228.” I think about the 2008 Postville Agriprocessors raid, the largest single raid of a workplace in US history to that point, in which a kosher slaughterhouse in northeastern Iowa was stormed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Just under four hundred workers were convicted of document fraud and served five months in prison before being deported. I think of the two 25,000-square-foot golden domes of Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, where hundreds of Iowans attempt to reach enlightenment through the practice of Transcendental Meditation.

I call and leave a message for my Iowa friend Chelsea, asking if I can sleep on her couch because I'd sublet my apartment to a traveling nurse for the summer.

Chelsea calls as I'm passing “the world's largest truckstop,” a four-hundred-parking-spot facility with a chrome and accessory shop for big rigs, two tricked-out semis, a dental clinic, theater, barber, public library, chiropractor, shower facility, and fast-food court. She says she's just landed from her own return trip through Korea, and that I can meet her at her place. As I pull up, her fat white cat jumps out of her roommate's open window and disappears into the neighbor's tall bushes. For a moment I think about climbing in through the window so I can go to sleep but decide it would be dangerous, so I sit on her porch chain-smoking. The eastern Iowa sunset this time of year makes whatever is underneath look picturesque. The intensity of the pinks and oranges seems impossible. On the drive here, the rolling hills really do look as pristine as they look in Grant Wood paintings, and it's very difficult to see why this is a fiction. Peppered along the roads there are long, one-level structures that look
like warehouses, with built-in fans down the sides. This is to mitigate the lack of windows. Each is crammed with tens of thousands of chickens that wallow in their own filth and have less than a square foot of space to move for most of their lives. And far from the roads, away from visibility, there are slaughterhouses that are illegal to photograph, staffed by temp agencies that broker undocumented labor.

When I open my eyes the following morning it takes me longer than usual to remember where I am. For a few moments after I raise my head, I think I might still be overseas, but as I examine the objects and furniture in the room—a dream catcher, earrings made of animal bones, a few crystals splayed out on an old wooden desk—I know I'm in the room of a hipster in the United States. I can hear the shower, and I remember that Chelsea had come home with a case of beer and that we'd gone to sleep only very recently. Because of the short notice, my parents weren't able to come for the ceremony, which didn't seem to bother them, so Chelsea said she'd accompany me to take photos. On our way out, our mutual friend Dylan, who grew up in the Alleghenies, shows up wearing a shirt with a collar, which is unusual for him, especially in the summertime. I've forgotten that I'd texted him at some point the previous evening, but it seemed appropriate that this Appalachian friend, the son of a street preacher, would be joining us. I'd lied to both of them, telling them that the ceremony started an hour before it actually did, because I felt confident that something would go wrong.

The first impediment presents itself in the form of a careening semi that comes inches from smashing into my driver's side and runs us off the road. I try not to over-swerve, but we pop onto the shoulder and narrowly miss a concrete embankment. When the car comes to a stop we don't acknowledge how close the bottom edge of the semi's cargo box came to the driver's side windows. We are still and silent for a moment, and then, not knowing what to do or
say, I accelerate back into traffic. The female voice on the GPS leads us off the highway into an area with several office parks. Here we encounter our second impediment. The voice tells us we've arrived as we pull into the lot, but there isn't a single vehicle here, only a small, one-level structure at the far end that looks abandoned or at least closed. We park, and, halfway expecting the doors not to open, we go inside. Two old men in guard uniforms are chatting about something and seem surprised to see us. It turns out the woman who I'd spoken with on the phone at USCIS gave me the incorrect address. The older of the two guards checks his watch and informs us that the naturalization ceremony is several towns over, in West Branch, which is about half an hour away. Dylan and Chelsea become agitated, thinking we'll surely miss the appointment, until I tell them we actually have more than enough time.

I have never been to West Branch, Iowa, before, but as we drive down what appears to be the main street, which we later discover is named Main Street, it looks utterly familiar. If not for a few new Camrys and minivans it would be like looking at a photograph from the forties or fifties. Many of the buildings are redbrick with ornate beige cornices and big windows with striped awnings, and one place has a faded US flag flapping in the wind, but several of the storefronts are closed, and there's no one on the street. We pull into the parking lot of what appears to be a small grocery store called Jack and Jill, and I make a comment about how nice it is to see a small independent grocery store still in operation in this small town, but Dylan corrects me, telling me it's a regional chain.

“Besides, most of these people shop at the Walmart in Coralville,” he says.

The young woman who checks us out doesn't say a word as she slides our items across the scanner. She just stares at our eyes, smacking her chewing gum, looking uninterested
and interested at the same time. She's short and thin and wears a big faded camouflage coat and loose jeans. My ham sandwich is under three dollars. When I open it, the white bread is soaked, either from the shredded iceberg lettuce or the ham. We walk toward the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum where the two old guards told us the ceremony would take place. Main Street is still empty and the sky looks big, like it's bearing down on buildings that might give under its weight at any moment. We round a corner onto another abandoned street that looks like a period piece film set, but this one appears much older. A weathered white sign reads “Downey Street” in hand-painted old-timey letters. We later learn that this historic-looking street is, in fact, a national historic site and the re-created neighborhood of Herbert Hoover's birth. It's lined with small cottages, a blacksmith shop, an old schoolhouse, a Quaker meetinghouse, and the tall native wildflowers and grasses that would have been here in the late nineteenth century. Some of the structures, like the small white cottage where Hoover was born, are only somewhat original. The cottage, for example, had been sold during Hoover's lifetime, a second story had been added, and the cottage had been rotated to face another street, but decades later, after Hoover became president, the cottage was bought back, the second floor removed, and the structure was turned to face Downey Street again for the purposes of historic authenticity.

We stand in front of the birth cottage, at the white pickets that line the small property. Chelsea points out that there's a water pump and pile of firewood in the yard, and Dylan wonders aloud who cuts the grass and whether or not the pump actually produces water. The buildings on the street were never as they are now. They were placed in rows like this to facilitate a “historical” experience, and on some days, some of the locals, who live just blocks over in houses with vinyl siding, are paid to wear bonnets and period clothing
and walk around, chop wood, and play games as though it were the late 1800s. The cottage is only fourteen by twenty feet, and it feels like this is what I'm supposed to walk away noting: its modesty. It's strange to think all these little houses sit empty and actors are paid to sometimes pretend to inhabit them. For Hoover, the cottage was “physical proof of the unbounded opportunity of American life,” and this is what he tells us his story tells: “In no other land could a boy from a country village, without inheritance or influential friends, look forward with unbound hope.” The house isn't lived in and cannot be sold, so its only use is as a tool for myth-making.

As we continue toward the library we come upon a pedestal topped by a seven-foot black statue of a woman sitting on a throne. Her face and body are draped in a thin black veil, giving her an ominous, almost ghoulish appearance. The veil, made of bronze, has been cast to look thin, airy, and somehow light. Her features, although obscured, are still perceptible. The three of us stand at the foot, and Chelsea points to an inscription at the base: “Je suis ce qui a été, ce qui est, et ce qui sera, et nul mortel n'a encore levé le volle qui me couvre.”
I am that which was, that which is, and that which will be, and no mortal has yet lifted the veil that covers me
. The figure, cast by Belgian sculptor Auguste Puttemans, is Isis, ancient Egyptian goddess of life and nature, whose name means throne, and whose headdress is often depicted in the shape of a throne. Belgians had meant the statue to be an expression of gratitude to Hoover for famine relief efforts during World War I, because Isis is sometimes used to represent the proliferation of grain, but in Egypt, Isis served primarily as the personification of the pharaoh's power. Three bronze flames emanate from her right hand, and she holds the key of life in her left.

“Weird,” says Chelsea, staring at her ghostly features.

This version of Isis, cloaked almost completely, does seem
peculiar. In Plutarch's
Moralia
, there is a reference to a statue of Athena in the ancient city of Saïs that contains a similar inscription: “I am all that has been, and is, and shall be, and my robe no mortal has yet uncovered.” Plutarch suggests that the statue of Athena represents the use of myth by the priestly and military classes from which kings were appointed. The cloaking of certain knowledge meant that only some would be privy to it, and so only some would be able to derive benefit from it. Moreover, the identification of Isis with Athena and the sculpture's Greek rather than Egyptian aesthetic bring to mind Athena's associations with courage, law, justice, and war strategy. It seems strangely appropriate on our way to the Hoover Library, then, to encounter this dark figure—cloaked and on her throne, overlooking a presidential birth cottage—like a sphinx at the entrance to the temple.