Internment(12)

This? I don’t suppose any of us know what to call the experience yet. Like World War I wasn’t called that when people were fighting it. How could it have been, when they didn’t know what would come after? Anyway, probably no one is thinking about an appropriately weighty yet catchy phrase to call our quagmire right now. We’re all too busy looking away and trying to believe it’s a collective nightmare we will eventually wake up from. I guess it’s pretty bad when a nightmare feels like a privilege.

We approach the station for A–E. It’s essentially a small desk with a Black Suit behind it.

“Reassignment documents,” he demands.

An Exclusion Guard at his side looks up and away, not making eye contact. Like everyone else. I wonder if it’s in their regulations: no eye contact with the Muslims.

My dad hands him the documents we were given back at home. Home. It’s disconcerting to even think about what’s happening there. Are the Suits ransacking it? Destroying our things?

The Black Suit takes our cards from my dad and places each one over a reader—the kind the TSA uses to scan your passport when you come back from a trip abroad. He hands them back to us. “Go inside. Report to Window Three for your IDs. It will be on your right as you enter the building.”

We shuffle inside Union Station along with nameless others. There are at least a hundred people in line at the old ticket windows, struggling to find a place to look that isn’t a painful reminder of what our collective reality is. All of them with a bag in hand and a stunned look on their faces. Someone cries out, breaking the silence; then there’s sobbing from one group, and then another. The clacking of computer keys continues, neither machine nor operator moved by tears. A couple of little kids—toddlers—run around, ignorant of what is happening. A baby screams. My mom once told me that she always knew what my cries meant, each one a little different: hungry, a wet diaper, tired, wanting attention. But a scream? My throat swells, and tears reach my eyes. Those kids, that baby—they have no idea what they are about to lose. I guess I don’t, either. Who even knows what’s happening, exactly, except that we were taken from our homes, and now we’re about to board a train to… somewhere. I tap my heel hard against the marble mosaic floor. Then harder. I shiver. This place is a tomb.

The Authority Suit at Window 3 reels us in with a beckoning finger. My dad hands over our cards with the QR codes. The Suit grabs my left hand and tries to pull it forward, but I snatch it back, a natural reaction to his unwelcome touch. The man raises his eyes to meet mine, his jaw set. He turns to my dad and then looks like he’s going to call a guard over. My dad grabs my hand and offers it to the Suit.

“She’ll comply.” That’s what he says. My jaw drops. Those words. She’ll comply. We will do what we’re told. We’ll go along. We won’t cause trouble. Don’t hurt us. That’s what my dad means.

The man clears his throat and nods. “We need to stamp the inside of your wrist with your ID number.”

I snap my mouth shut. I turn my hand over, palm facing up. What else am I supposed to do? He grabs it and places it in a black machine that looks like it could make espresso.

“Hold still,” he says as a two-inch rectangular metal bar descends and presses into the soft flesh on the inside of my wrist for a few seconds. When the bar rises up, I see nothing on my skin. It’s UV. Ultraviolet. Invisible ink. Permanent, the man explains, like an automaton.

He doesn’t look me in the eye, either. No one does. He stamps my parents’ wrists and then gives us seat assignments on the train and warns us not to sit elsewhere. As we head to the platform, I grip my wrist like someone has cut me with a knife. I hold it close to my face, then farther away, squinting, holding my wrist up to the fluorescent slants of light that pass through the hall. I can’t feel the mark; I can’t see it. But it’s there. Forever. I rub at the thin skin on the underside of my wrist until it turns red.

The platform is full, but there’s no jostling. The Authority has frightened all the fidgeting out of us. A loud monotone voice over the intercom instructs us: “Go directly to the train car you have been assigned. Present your left wrist for scanning as you enter the car. Sit in your assigned seat. The Exclusion Authority thanks you for your cooperation.”

My mother takes my hand as we enter our train car. I try to pull it away, but she only squeezes it tighter. Looking around, I shake my head, like I need a double take. The car is a normal train car. I don’t know what I was expecting. I look down the aisle: A rubber mat runs along the center, with rows of three navy-blue cloth-covered seats on either side. Foggy, scuffed-up windows offer limited views onto the dim platform. A chemically vanilla smell wafts around the car—the kind you spray to mask pet or unpleasant cooking odors. A regular, nondescript conventional train that has probably been decommissioned, since California rail has gone high-speed. There are seats on these trains; they’re not cattle cars—like the kind I’ve seen in my history textbooks—carrying people to their deaths. But we’re being forced onto them with no real idea of where we’re going or what to expect at the end of the line. I feel pressed. Like when we read The Crucible last year. I couldn’t wrap my mind around Giles Corey being pressed to death—stones being laid upon his chest, one after another, to make him admit to witchcraft, and he refused to speak except to say “More weight” when they urged him to confess. That’s what the air feels like in this car, why it feels hard to breathe. We’re being pressed by fear and hatred and the law.