Blocks of color stormed my window for a full minute. By the time the freight train had passed, the sky over the Hudson Valley had brightened still further and the formerly brown and silver Hudson was a bluish white.
Unseen on this earth, I alighted at Albany-Rensselaer with tears in my eyes and went to my meeting.
Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day. It was into one such dreamlike, double-dealing evening in January 2003, at Herald Square, that I stumbled out of the building occupied by New York’s Department of Motor Vehicles. After years of driving rental cars with a disintegrating and legally dubious international license issued in the United Kingdom, I had finally decided to buy and insure a car of my own—which required me to get an American driver’s license. But I couldn’t trade my British license (itself derived from a Dutch one) for an American one: such an exchange was for some unexplainable reason only feasible during the first thirty days of an alien’s permanent residence in the United States. I would have to get a learner permit and submit to a driving test all over again: which entailed, as a first step, a written examination on the rules of the road of the Empire State.
At the time, I didn’t question this odd ambition or my doggedness in relation to it. I can say quite ingenuously that I was attempting to counter the great subtractions that had lessened my life and that the prospect of an addendum, even one as slight as a new license and a new car, seemed important at the time; and no doubt I was drawn to a false syllogism involving the nothingness of my life and the somethingness of doing. All that said, I didn’t let Rachel know what I was up to. She would have taken my actions as a statement of intent, and maybe she wouldn’t have been entirely wrong. It would not have helped much to point out that, if I was indeed embracing an American lot, then I was doing so unprogrammatically, even unknowingly. Perhaps the relevant truth—and it’s one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I’m sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me—is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you’re paying attention you’ll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.
Carried along, then, by the dark flow of those times, I approached the Department of Motor Vehicles. The DMV was in a building coated in black glass and chiefly identifiable by a large sign for Daffy’s, an entity I took to be somehow connected to Daffy Duck but which turned out to be a department store. I avoided Daffy’s—and Modell’s Sporting Goods, and Mrs. Fields Cookies, and Hat & Cap, and Payless ShoeSource, other occupants of the eerily unfrequented mall known as the Herald Center—by taking the express elevator to the eighth floor. A bell for the benefit of the blind burped at intervals as I rose. Then the elevator door halved and slid away and I stood before the DMV premises. There was a static turnstile like a monster’s unearthed skeleton, and there was a set of glass doors in constant use. Approaching these, I was barged into by a middle-aged woman making her exit.
“Get out of my way,” she sobbed.
I joined the line to the reception desk, where two sweating men furiously gave directions. “I’m here for the written test,” I said. “You got your social security card? ID?” “Yes,” I said, reaching for my pocket. “I don’t want to see it,” the man snapped, thrusting forms at me.
I entered the main administrative area. The low ceiling was supported by an extraordinary clutter of columns; so many, in fact, that I could not avoid the perverse impression that the room was in danger of collapsing. An enormous counter ran around three-quarters of the office like a fortification, and behind it, visible between crenellations made by partitions and computer terminals, were the DMV employees. Two of them, women in their thirties, screamed with laughter by a photocopying machine; but as soon as they reached their positions at the counter they wore faces of sullen hostility. One could understand why, for assembled before them was a perpetually reinforced enemy, its troops massing relentlessly on the hard pewlike benches. Many of those seated were hunched forward with hands clasped and heads bowed, raising their eyes only to follow the stupendous figures—E923, A062, C568—that randomly appeared on screens with the purpose, never achieved, of moderating the agony of suspense in which visitors were placed.
I filled out my application form and stood in the queue of those waiting to be photographed. After my photograph was taken, I was told to sit on a bench and wait: my green card, which I’d handed over as proof of identity, would have to be checked by the Department of Homeland Security. An hour or so later, approval was forthcoming. I waited another twenty minutes and then shuffled with a handful of others to the test area, which was furnished with that heart-sinking grid of desks and chairs familiar to examinees everywhere. There were requests for test sheets in Chinese, French, Spanish. I rapidly answered the multiple-choice questions and handed my sheet to the invigilator. It gave me a childish satisfaction to have finished before anyone else. I returned to my desk and waited for the examination period to expire. The invigilator, an obese Hispanic woman, marked erroneous answers with superb strokes of her pencil. When she came to my paper, the pencil hovered and hovered; then she scribbled twenty (out of twenty) and handed it to me with a frown. I experienced a rush of happiness. Now, at last, I could collect my learner permit.
I received a ticket—say, D499—and further instructions to wait. So I waited. Perplexed and rebuffed Chinese men wandered everywhere. I listened to 106.7 Lite FM and watched a television screen on which “Entertainment News,” rather than actual entertainment, was broadcast. I studied driving safety posters: YOU SNOOZE, YOU LOSE, it was said. At last my number came up. A balding man in his fifties inspected my paperwork all over again. It fell to applicants to produce proof of identity worth six points: a green card scored three points, an original social security card two points, and a credit card or a bank statement or a utilities bill a single point. The man shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, unapologetically pushing my documents back to me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I can’t take the credit card. It’s got somebody else’s name on it.”
I looked. My name, which by a miracle of typography was fully spelled out on my social security card, is Johannus Franciscus Hendrikus van den Broek. My credit card, for obvious reasons, identified me merely as Johannus F. H. van den Broek—exactly as my green card did.
I said, “That’s my name. If you—”
“I don’t want to talk about it. Go see the supervisor. Counter ten. Next.”
I went to counter ten. There were three people already in line. Each had an argument with the supervisor; each went away in a rage. Then it was my turn. The supervisor was in his late thirties, with a severely shaved head and a little goatee and an earring. He wordlessly extended his hand and I passed him my documents of identification. In exchange he passed me a notice: ALL FORMS OF IDENTIFICATION MUST SHOW THE SAME NAME.
He quickly compared my papers. “You got to show me documents with the same name,” he said. “This Con Ed bill is no good.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. I pulled out a bank statement I’d brought along in case of difficulty. It, too, was in the name of Johannus F. H. van den Broek, but it contained copies of checks I’d written. “You see?” I said. “The signature on those checks is exactly the same as the signature on my social security card and green card. So it’s obviously me in both cases.”
He shook his head. “I’m not a handwriting expert,” he said. “I need the same name.”
“OK,” I said calmly. “But let me ask you this. The green card’s good, right? And the name on the Con Ed bill and the bank statement is the same as the name on the green card.”
The supervisor reexamined my green card. “Actually, you got yourself another problem,” he said with a smile. “See this? The name on the green card is not the same as the name on the social security card.”
I looked: on the green card was typed “Johanus.�
�� I’d never noticed it before.
I said, “Yes, well, that’s just an obvious clerical error made by the INS. The photograph on the green card is obviously me.” The supervisor looked unmoved, so I added, “Either that, or there’s somebody out there who looks exactly like me and has exactly the same name, and I happen to have stolen his green card.”
“Not exactly the same name,” the supervisor said. “And that’s where we have a problem. You want me to give you a learner permit? OK, but who are you? Are you Johanus”—he pronounced the last two syllables as an obscenity—“or are you Johannus?”
“Come on, let’s not play games,” I said.
“You think I’m playing a game?” He was actually baring his teeth. “Let me remind you, sir, you seem to be in possession of somebody else’s green card—either that, or somebody else’s social security card. I might just get suspicious about that. I might just have to start looking into that.”
This man was dangerous, I realized. I said, “You really want me to go down to the INS and get a new green card? That’s what you want to get out of this?”
“I don’t want you to go there,” the supervisor said. Now he was pointing at my chest. “I’m forcing you to go there.”
“What about my written test?” I said, pathetically showing him my twenty out of twenty.
He smiled. “You’re going to have to take it again.”
And so I was in a state of fuming helplessness when I stepped out into the inverted obscurity of the afternoon. As I stood there, thrown by Herald Square’s flows of pedestrians and the crazed traffic diagonals and the gray, seemingly bottomless gutter pools, I was seized for the first time by a nauseating sense of America, my gleaming adopted country, under the secret actuation of unjust, indifferent powers. The rinsed taxis, hissing over fresh slush, shone like grapefruits; but if you looked down into the space between the road and the undercarriage, where icy matter stuck to pipes and water streamed down the mud flaps, you saw a foul mechanical dark.
Corralled by the black snow ranged along the curbs, I found myself hastening, for lack of a clear alternative, to the triangular traffic island at Broadway and Thirty-second Street known as Greeley Square Park. Glowing orange Christmas lights peppered the trees. I came to a statue of one Horace Greeley, a newspaperman and politician of the nineteenth century and, the plaque at the statue’s base further asserted, the coiner of the phrase “Go West, young man, go West.” Greeley, apparently a fellow with an enormous egglike head, was seated in an armchair. Staring blindly into the void beyond his feet, he wore an expression of devastation, as if the newspaper he clutched in his right hand contained terrible news. I decided to walk homeward down Broadway. The route, unfamiliar to me, passed through the old Tin Pan Alley quarter, blocks now given over to wholesalers and street vendors and freight forwarders and import-exporters—UNDEFEATED WEAR CORP, SPORTIQUE, DA JUMP OFF, signs proclaimed—dealing in stuffed toys, caps, novelties, human hair, two-dollar belts, one-dollar neckties, silver, perfumes, leather goods, rhinestones, street-wear, watches. Arabs, West Africans, African Americans hung out on the sidewalks among goods trucks, dollies, pushcarts, food carts, heaped trash, boxes and boxes of merchandise. I might have been in a cold Senegal. Black-skinned buyers carrying garbage bags wandered in and out of the stores while overseers and barkers and hawkers, dressed in leather jackets, fur coats, African robes, and tracksuits, jingled keys and talked on cell phones and idly heckled passing women and shouted for custom. On Twenty-seventh Street I turned toward Fifth Avenue: the cold had gotten to me, and I’d decided to catch a taxi. As I approached Fifth my eye was drawn to a banner hanging from a second-floor window: CHUCK CRICKET, INC.
The names of various enterprises were taped to a signboard at the front of the building’s entrance: Peruvian Amity Society, Apparitions International, Elvis Tookey Boxing, and, at suite 203, Chuck Cricket, Inc., Chuck Import-Export, Inc., and Chuck Industries, Inc. Why not? I thought, and went in. On the second floor I entered a tiny lobby with a receptionist who sat behind a security glass next to a video monitor that colorlessly transmitted, in jerking four-second fragments, dismal images of stairs, elevator interiors, and passageways. The receptionist buzzed me in without a word. I walked down a narrow corridor covered in teal carpeting and knocked on the door of suite 203.
Chuck himself opened the door, a telephone at his ear. He tapped on the back of a chair and gestured for me to sit. He seemed wholly unsurprised to see me.
The office consisted of a room with space for a couple of desks and a few filing cabinets. Sheetrock walls were decorated with posters of Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara, the greatest batsmen in the world. A strumming sound drifted through from a guitar instructor next door. Chuck winked at me as he dealt with his call. “It’s my wife,” he mouthed. He wore an open-collared shirt and neatly creased trousers that spilled generously over sneakers. I noticed for the first time a couple of large gold rings on his fingers and, running in the dark hair beneath his throat, a necklace’s gold drool.
I was startled, in the midst of these impressions, by a strange whistling sound. The whistling was followed, after a few seconds’ pause, by a fresh sequence of chirps, and then by a popping like the pop of a bouncing Ping-Pong ball.
Chuck passed over a CD case. We were listening to Disc Two of Bird Songs of California: Olive-Sided Flycatcher through Varied Thrush.
As I waited for Chuck to finish his phone call, the muffled guitar music and the birdsong were joined by the ringing of a phone from the other adjoining office. A male voice sounded loudly: “Hello?” The voice came through again: “I’m not a mind reader. I can’t read your mind.” A pause. “Stop it. Just stop it. Would you please just stop it.” Another pause. “Fuck you, all right? Fuck you.” I lowered my eyes. Paper glue traps for mice, baited with peanut butter and bearing the words ASSURED ENVIRONMENTS, littered the space under the radiators.
Chuck hung up and I said, “I was just walking home from the DMV. I happened to see your sign.”
“You live nearby?”
I mentioned the block.
“Well, it’s delightful to see you,” Chuck said. He was leaning back in his chair and, my explanation notwithstanding, considering why I, an important man with better things to do, had chosen to drop by. Chuck was too astute not to have detected that somewhere behind this impromptu visit lay some need on my part—and neediness, in business as in romance, represents an opportunity. But how, as I sat before him to the background tweeting of a Townsend’s solitaire or black-tailed gnatcatcher, was he going to proceed? He knew that a cold pitch involving sales charts, cash-flow projections, and marketing studies wouldn’t work. Also, it would have been alien to him to be so uncomplicated in his methods. Chuck valued craftiness and indirection. He found the ordinary run of dealings between people boring and insufficiently advantageous to him at the deep level of strategy at which he liked to operate. He believed in owning the impetus of a situation, in keeping the other guy off balance, in proceeding by way of sidesteps. If he saw an opportunity to act with suddenness or take you by surprise or push you into the dark, he’d take it, almost as a matter of principle. He was a willful, clandestine man who followed his own instincts and analyses and would rarely be influenced by advice—not my advice, that’s for sure. The truth is that there was nothing, or very little, I could have done to produce a different ending for Chuck Ramkissoon.
But it was a while before any of this came to me. Because his deviousness was so transparent and because it alternated with an immigrant’s credulousness—his machinating and trusting selves seemed, like Box and Cox, never to meet—I found all of the feinting and dodging and thrusting oddly soothing. Then again, this was a time when I found solace in the patter of Jehovah’s Witnesses who stopped me in the street, a time when I was tempted to consult the fat beckoning lady psychic who sat like an Amsterdam hooker in a basement window on West Twenty-third Street. I was glad of the considerateness, however misconceived. My life had shrunk to
very small proportions—too small, certainly, for New York’s pickier and more plausible agents of sympathy. To put it another way: I was, to anyone who could be bothered to pay attention, noticeably lost. Chuck paid attention and thus noticed. So, instead of immediately pouncing on me with business details, he came up with a different plan. He was going to fascinate me.
He took another call. When he was done, he said, “That was my partner, Mike Abelsky. He’s just had that stomach reduction operation. You know, they take it and they shrink it to the size of a walnut. He’s doing great. Two weeks, and he’s already lost thirty pounds.”
A loud commotion sounded on Twenty-seventh Street. We looked outside. Three men—two Arabs and an African, it looked like—were ineffectually assaulting a black man, aiming kicks and punches that bounced off the suitcase the man held up. They retreated and spontaneously attacked again with loud shouts. Then a fourth party sprinted up to the man with the suitcase and struck him repeatedly with a collapsible chair, knocking him to the ground. A police siren sounded somewhere. The attackers disappeared into a building and the man with the suitcase picked himself up and hurried away.
Chuck Ramkissoon chuckled. “I love it here. Dog eat dog. No holds barred.”
The neighbor was raising his voice again. “No, listen to me for once. Just let me say what I have to say. Would you do that for me? Would you just shut the fuck up for one time in your life and just fucking listen?”
Chuck, touching his pockets for his keys, said, “Usually I have my director of operations here, a nice kid, you’d like him.” As if I might doubt him, Chuck went over to the vacant desk and fetched a business card belonging to MO CADRE, DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS. A fresh burst of twanging came from the guitar instructor. Chuck put on a Yankees cap.
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