When the Lights Go Out(18)

“Got any mail with your name on it?” the woman wants to know, but I shrug my shoulders and tell her no. She gives me a look. Disbelief, I think. I’m as much of a skeptic as the next guy; I know how this sounds.

“Please, ma’am,” I beg. I’m tired and I don’t know what else to do. My eyes feel heavy, threatening to close. There’s the greatest desire to lie down on the floor and sleep. Except that it’s only a tease, my body playing tricks on me. Even if I lie outstretched on the linoleum tiles, I still wouldn’t sleep.

“I really need that birth certificate, ma’am,” I say, shuffling in place, and it must be something about the way my voice cracks or the tears that well in my eyes that makes her lean forward and snatch the money from the countertop. She gathers the bills into her hand, counting them one at a time. Her eyes take a quick poll of the room to see if anyone else is watching, listening, before she whispers, “How about this. How about I see if I can find anything first. Then we’ll figure out what to do about the ID.”

I say okay.

She takes the form and begins typing information onto the rows of keys.

My heart pounds inside my chest. My hands sweat. In just a few short minutes, I’ll know who my father is. I start thinking about his name. Whether he’s still alive. And if he is, if he thinks about me the way I think about him.

By now, there are at least twenty people in line behind me. The room isn’t large by any means. It’s stodgy and drab, and everyone is looking at everyone else like they’re a common criminal. Ladies clutch their purses to their sides. A kid in line screams that he has to pee. As he yells, I glance over my shoulder to see this poor kid, maybe four years old, hand pressed to his groin, eyes wide and ready to burst, his mother reading him the riot act for nature’s call.

“There were no records found,” the woman says to me then. Not at all the words I expected to hear. My face falls flat; my mouth parts. For a second I’m confused, unable to produce coherent thoughts or words.

I fight to find my voice, asking, “Are you sure you spelled it correctly?” imagining her hunting and pecking for the letters, clipping the corner edge of some surplus letter by mistake, misspelling my name.

But her face remains motionless. She doesn’t attempt another search, as I’d hoped she’d do. She doesn’t glance down at the computer or check her work.

“I’m sure,” she says, raising a hand into the air to beckon for the next customer.

“But wait,” I say, stopping her. Not willing to give up just yet.

“There were no records found, miss,” she tells me again, and I ask, feeling incredulous, “What does that mean then, no records found?” because what I’m suddenly realizing is that, instead of being dead, the crux of the matter is that there is no birth record on file for me.

I can’t be dead because I haven’t yet been born.

The Bureau of Vital Records doesn’t even know I exist.

“Of course you must have found something,” I argue, not waiting for a reply. My voice elevates. “How can there be no birth certificate for me when clearly I’m alive?”

And then I pinch a fold of skin on my arm, watching as it swells and turns red before shriveling back down to size. I do it so that she and I can both see I’m alive.

“Ma’am,” she says, and there’s a shift in posture, her empathy quickly giving way to aggravation. I’ve become a pest. “You left half this form blank,” she says.

I argue that she told me I could. That she was the one who said I didn’t have to fill it all out. She ignores me, continues to speak. “Who’s to say you were even born in Illinois? Were you born in Illinois?” she asks, challenging me, calling my bluff, and I realize that I don’t know. I don’t know where I was born. All my life, I only assumed. Because Mom never told me otherwise and I never thought to ask.

“No records found means that I couldn’t locate a birth certificate based on the information you gave me. You want to find your birth certificate, you need to fill in the rest of these blanks,” she tells me, slipping the request form back to me as I stare down helplessly at all the missing information, name of father, place of birth, wondering if what I filled in was even correct to begin with.

Was Mom always a Sloane like me? That I’d also assumed. But if she was married when I was born, then maybe she had a different last name, one she ditched at some point over the last twenty years for some reason I don’t know?

“And next time,” the employee tacks on as I back dismally away, losing hope, running blindly into another woman in line, “be sure and bring your ID.”

I make my way out the door, climbing back up to the first floor two steps at a time. The building’s stairwell is industrial and dark, a flash of gray that comes at me quickly. It spirals upward in circles for thirty floors or more. When I arrive on the first floor, slipping through the stairwell door, crowds flood the lobby of the Daley Center. I’m grateful for this, for the anonymity of it all. I camouflage myself among the wayward teens who’ve been summoned here for court, those with purple-dyed hair and heads hidden beneath sweatshirt hoods. I make my way back outside, nowhere closer to finding my father or proving my identity.

As far as the world is concerned, I’m still dead.





eden