Alien, Invader
It’s early fall, 2004. Three years since the towers fell in lower Manhattan. A year since Marcia Kadish and Tanya McCloskey of Malden, Massachusetts, made history as the first gay couple to be legally wed in the United States. I drop out of school and fly to Boston to marry an American woman I met in a study-abroad program at my third-rate vocational college in the English Midlands. We’ve been dating less than a year. We don’t spend months agonizing over venues or dresses or table settings, and my soon-to-be-wife doesn’t apply for a spouse visa on my behalf, because neither of us know that she should; we get married on a whim because we think we’re in love. There is no grand ceremony, and none of my family are there. I wear the only suit I own, and my soon-to-be-wife wears the cheap, emerald-green satin dress she wore to her senior prom. The pastor of my soon-to-be-wife’s church––a folksy, good-natured man who shares his name with the long-dead singer of a ‘60s psychedelic rock band who was laid to rest in Paris–– officiates over the small, impromptu gathering. There is no cake. Our first meal together as husband and wife is Italian cold-cut sandwiches that my brand-new, deeply skeptical brother-in- law steals from the D’Angelo’s sandwich shop franchise he manages. After the ceremony––if you can call it that––we drive up to Portland, Maine, to attend the wedding of one of my new wife’s high-school friends, at which we have our own private reception only we know about. Our first secret. I am barely old enough to drink legally in the United States, and now I am a husband. We remain married for almost eight hard years. Of course, I don’t know any of this right now.
Shortly after we marry, the wheels of bureaucracy slowly begin to turn as the federal government processes my change in status from visitor to resident. I move into my new wife’s apartment in a depressed, post-industrial city 40 miles or so west of Boston, shortly after which we move to a small town in southern Massachusetts best known for its living museum in which costumed actors recreate the bleak, punishing life of Puritan colonists in the 1790s for tour buses full of unruly schoolchildren. We live there for just a few months, during which time I try––and fail––to find work with the United States Postal Service, before settling for a minimum-wage cashier job at a major housewares retailer that will go bankrupt four years from now in a devastating financial crash nobody knows is coming. I drive to work every day in my new wife’s Chevrolet Malibu without a driver’s license, and pray to my new wife’s god that I don’t get pulled over.
About a month after I start that job, I get a phone call from my father in England telling me that the doctor has found a lump in my mother’s breast, which turns out to be stage three breast cancer. She’ll survive the cancer, after a double mastectomy and radiation therapy, but I don’t know this right now. We make hasty preparations to leave the United States and fly back to England so we can be nearby during my mother’s treatment. We sell my new wife’s Chevy, break our lease, and jet across the Atlantic. The one thing we don’t do is file an application with the federal government for a travel document, which I’ll soon learn is also called a re-entry permit.
We don’t do this because we have no idea whether my mother will survive the cancer that has invaded her body and we’re more concerned with how to pay for our airfare than we are about crucial immigration paperwork we have no idea even exists.
Not long after we arrive in Britain, the weight of our mistakes begins to sorely test our matrimonial union. My wife is unable to fill the quetiapine prescription she needs to manage her bipolar disorder, and she becomes powerfully homesick after just a few weeks of our dreary makeshift life in my depressing coastal hometown. My already-serious drinking problem soon worsens considerably, and I spend many nights in pubs and nightclubs while my wife hides behind a locked bedroom door at my parent’s home. After six weeks or so of my alcoholic neglect, I return home one night, piss-drunk and barely able to stand, at which point my wife confronts and physically attacks me in my parent’s kitchen before fleeing barefoot into the night. I clumsily give chase, and find her sobbing in a doorway a short distance from my parent’s house. The next day, my mother––who has not yet had both breasts surgically removed nor begun her radiation treatment––forces my father to purchase a one-way ticket home for my wife, which she enthusiastically accepts.
*
Congratulations on becoming a permanent resident of the United States of America! On behalf of the president of the United States and the American people, we welcome you and wish you every success here. The United States has a long history of welcoming immigrants from all parts of the world. America values the contributions of immigrants who continue to enrich this country and preserve its legacy as a land of freedom and opportunity. As a permanent resident of the United States, you have made a decision to call this country your home. As you work to achieve your goals, take time to get to know this country, its history, and its people. It is now both your right and your responsibility to shape the future of the United States and to ensure its continued success. Exciting opportunities await you as you begin your life as a permanent resident of this great country. Welcome to the United States!
That’s from the “Welcome to America!” guide that comes with your green card. It has––what else––a picture of the Statue of Liberty on the cover, along with images of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, a shot from a national park in what looks like Utah, and what seems to be a coastal residential community that could have been taken anywhere between Cape Cod and southern Florida. The guide is part of a whole informational packet that tells you how to be a good immigrant. There’s a handy directory of federal agencies, in case you need to call the Department of Justice or want to report yourself to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, as well as brief guides on how to rent an apartment, apply for a driver’s license, and file tax returns. It also contains helpful warnings, such as the fact that “there may be serious consequences for you as a permanent resident if you are a habitual drunkard or someone who is drunk or uses illegal drugs most of the time.” The criminal implications of using illegal narcotics seems straightforward enough, but the guide doesn’t specify what these consequences are, or define what the federal government considers habitual drunkenness to be, or explain how immigration officials might be alerted to such behavior, all of which make it vaguely ominous.
It would have helped if the British government had prepared a similar pamphlet for people emigrating overseas. They could call it So You’ve Decided to Leave Britain Forever. It could contain advice on topics like how to break it to your family that you might never see them again.
There would, of course, have to be a section on what to do when right-wing billionaires hold your country’s media apparatus hostage and convince the electorate to embark on a self- destructive campaign of social and economic vandalism that will take generations to repair, assuming it even can be repaired. There could be a sidebar with suggestions on how to watch helplessly as a mendacious, criminal government of authoritarians and thieves seizes control of your country’s archaic parliamentary mechanisms to entrench its own power and criminalize dissent. It could conclude with helpful tips on how to manage the wrenching guilt you may feel after escaping from a failing state slowly collapsing under the weight of its own corruption while your loved ones struggle to heat their homes and feed their children. Such a pamphlet would likely be quite thick, but it would make for ideal reading on a long flight.
I read somewhere that immigrants are, by definition, dreamers. Not the kind they have in America––they don’t like to talk about those––but dreamers in the Imagine-era John Lennon sense. A sense of optimism, a quiet belief in unseen potential, is almost mandatory for those who leave their families behind in search of something better, whether love or money or survival. We have to envision something better, otherwise nobody would voluntarily go through all the uncertainty and loneliness. Even those who risk everything by traveling north through Latin America to cross the Rio Grande in the hopes of reaching American soil have to dare to believe that somehow, they––or, at least, their children––will make it to the other side, that life in America will be better than it is in the countries they fled.
But many immigrants come here believing in a country that doesn’t exist, that never existed. Whether selling snake oil in the Old West or refashioning their national identity on the world stage, Americans have always had the rest of the world licked when it comes to marketing. The guidebook that comes with your green card might as well tell you how to adjust to life in Atlantis. It claims that the United States is a law-abiding society, but fails to clarify that those laws only apply to certain people in certain places, that driving a car after three beers can carry harsher penalties than attempting to violently overthrow the federal government in a failed coup. It says that police officers are there to protect you and your family, that you should not be afraid if you are stopped by a police officer, but doesn’t say that, if you’re Black, you might be summarily executed for the crime of talking on a cell phone in your grandmother’s back yard or walking home from a convenience store or sleeping peacefully in your bed. It tells you that America has a long history of welcoming immigrants from all over the world, but doesn’t tell you that kindness and compassion have been outlawed, that leaving food or water for migrants lost in the seemingly endless deserts of southern Arizona is a criminal act. Strange omissions for a guidebook that takes the time to allude to the serious consequences of habitual drunkenness.
Only in America do immigrants risk so much for a country that hates them.
*
It’s early February, 2005. A couple of weeks from now, three recent college graduates will launch a website called YouTube from a cramped office above a pizzeria in San Mateo, California, and an international treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol will finally go into effect after years of protracted political bickering. After calling and emailing each other every day for months, trying to salvage our fledgling marriage from either side of an ocean, my wife and I agree that seeing each other in person is vitally important to the survival of our relationship and we begin making plans to reunite on Valentine’s Day, because we think that’s the kind of romantic thing that people who really love each other do––or I do, anyway. The only flight I can afford is from London’s Gatwick to Boston via Minneapolis-Saint Paul, which adds a minor detour of 1,100 miles to an already seven-hour, 3,200-mile flight.
Upon arrival in the Twin Cities, a Border Patrol agent on duty at the International Arrivals terminal asks me the purpose of my visit to the United States. I proudly tell him I’m here to see my wife. With a furrowed brow, he asks me several follow-up questions, including where my re- entry permit is. I tell him I don’t have one, that the only travel document I have is my passport. Visibly confused, the agent radios for assistance, at which point I am escorted to a cramped, windowless room elsewhere in the airport with a tiny CCTV camera with a red blinking light in one corner.
It is in this room that I am questioned for the next five hours by two Department of Homeland Security agents about the nature of my trip, about my marriage, about my primary country of residence, about my plans upon my intended arrival in Boston, about my lack of a valid re-entry permit. One agent is cordial, almost friendly, and bears more than a passing resemblance to the actor J.K. Simmons. His colleague, a younger man who doesn’t remind me of anybody, is abrupt and clearly relishing his role as Bad Cop. I haven’t had a cigarette in almost nine hours and have no choice but to chew the disgusting nicotine gum I brought for the flight, which tastes like chewing on a wet menthol cigarette butt fresh from an ashtray and at one point makes me retch into the room’s tiny wastepaper basket, which greatly alarms both agents who seem to believe it to be a ruse. After asking me the same questions over and over again, the agents seem reluctantly satisfied that I pose no threat to national security. J.K. Simmons buys me a meal from McDonald’s––a double quarter-pounder with fries and the largest Coke I’ve ever seen––and even bums a couple of cigarettes from one of the baggage handlers for me. I do not know this right now, but this will be the kindest, most compassionate experience I will ever have with an agent of the Department of Homeland Security. When I’m finished eating and smoking––nothing like a good smoke after a meal––I am permitted to call my wife from a payphone to tell her I won’t be making my connecting flight to Boston. J.K. Simmons hands me the quarters. As I dial I expect her to sound upset, maybe even cry. I’m tired and afraid and feel the hot sting of tears behind my eyes but promise myself I won’t cry in front of the agents. But my wife’s voice sounds distracted, as if someone else is talking to her at the same time. Okay, she says. Call me when you land.
After these small mercies, the agents inform me that I am ineligible for admission to the United States of America, and my passport is marked to indicate such. They frog-march me through the Departures terminal to the next available flight to the United Kingdom. The long line of tired- looking people waiting for our flight to begin boarding watches me intently as we pass. I feel like an international drug lord being extradited to face trial overseas, like Pablo Escobar, though I won’t know who that is for several years. I’m the very first person to be seated. First-class treatment, even in coach. A few rows away is an Air Marshall, which have become permanent additions to all American flight crews since the towers fell. He barely takes his eyes off me the entire flight.
*
America has long romanticized the origin stories of the immigrant; familiar tales told through grainy newsreel footage of families with little more than whatever they could cram into steamer trunks making perilous journeys across the ocean to America’s shining shores.
My own story is not without a certain charm, but beyond heartbreak and embarrassment, I risked nothing by coming to America. I didn’t risk retaliatory violence or a brutal, agonizing death for fleeing the extortion of the cartels. I didn’t risk drowning by crossing the Rio Grande in the dead of night, watching flashlights dance like fireflies as armed guards patrolled the banks. I didn’t risk decades of imprisonment in a federal penitentiary by muling heroin through the checkpoint in Nogales, Arizona, with counterfeit papers. People don’t look at me with narrowed eyes. They don’t tell me to go back to places I’ve never been. They don’t blame the wrong faith I don’t have for terrible things I didn’t do. Several Americans have told me that I’m “one of the good ones”–– I never ask them what that means, or what makes them think that––but still I feel fear.
Americans live in mortal terror of the ists and the isms. Socialism. Communism. Marxism. Terrorists. Economists. Scientists. They ask about the very worst of the ists on the application form you have to complete to get your green card. Have you EVER been a member of, or in any way affiliated with, the Communist Party or any other totalitarian party (in the United States or abroad)? I told the government I wasn’t a Communist and they gave me a green card. Another satisfied customer. People are often surprised to learn that green cards really are the faded pistachio green of a crumpled dollar bill found in the back pocket of a pair of jeans. My green card says Permanent Resident on it––right there along with my alien number––but my life feels anything but permanent. So much has changed since I arrived more than a decade ago. President Biden promised action, amnesty, the hope of decency after years of the sick, gleeful depravity wrought by his predecessor, and still the cruel machinery of America’s vast immigration system demands yet more suffering. The wall is still being built. Families are still being separated at the border. The mass deportation of refugees is still accelerating. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
The people on TV say we’re on the brink of war. Culture war. Civil war. Nuclear war. I thought we were already at war.
*
“Why didn’t you marry someone from your own country?”
The consular officer does not look up as he asks me this. He speaks in a rote monotone, as if verifying my date of birth or place of employment. His words are so flat they barely register as a question. For a moment I wonder if perhaps I have misheard him. Is he allowed to ask me that? He looks up from his paperwork, no discernible emotion on his face, and stares with the bored, distant expression of someone who has no choice but to listen. He reminds me of a young James Spader.
It’s 2010, almost spring. I’m in the United States Embassy in London, a building completed in 1960 designed by American architect Eero Saarinen, who also designed the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri. John Adams used to live just down the street in 1785. Of course, I don’t know any of this right now. In a few weeks, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig will explode, killing eleven people and spilling more than two hundred million gallons of oil as it sinks beneath the Gulf of Mexico. Nobody knows this right now, either.
My application paperwork is not all that is in my file. The Embassy also has X-rays of my chest and reports of what is in my blood, tests that were performed by the only Embassy-approved physician in London––quite the monopoly––at significant expense several months ago. The chest X-rays are to prove I do not have tuberculosis. The blood work is to prove I do not have HIV, which until two months ago was an immediately disqualifying factor for all foreign aliens hoping to emigrate to the United States. Since I have already bled for America, the federal government has chosen to keep the results.
I don’t know how to answer the consular officer’s question, but I do know that I must. I smile and say something cute about finding love in unexpected places, hoping to break the ice. He stares at me for several seconds before returning his attention to the paperwork before him.
Perhaps the ice was too thick, like the Thames in a grim Dickensian winter.
We have been waiting almost two years for this appointment, my American wife and I. But she isn’t here with me; she left England over a year ago after five long years of trying to make it work in the British capital. Five hard years of lost jobs and failed plans, of bitter resentment and hungover apologies. She hates it here, and says so often. No, right now my wife is back home, in Massachusetts, looking for a job and a car and a place for us to live. Everything we had before. Laying the groundwork so we can be together again.
Starting over.
Soon, despite the consular officer’s apparent skepticism and the denial of admission on my record, the federal government will issue me the spouse visa that will secure me a green card, and I will finally book a one-way flight to America. Two weeks before I’m due to leave, my wife will confess that she has been sleeping with two men for months, that she thinks she might be in love with one of them, that she’s so sorry. For everything. Even after all that’s happened, we’ll still give each other one last chance neither of us really wants or deserves because we’re afraid to face what comes next. We’ll go to couples therapy with the youth pastor of my soon-to-be-ex-wife’s church for a while––the folksy, good-natured pastor who married us, the one who shares his name with the long-dead singer of a ‘60s psychedelic rock band who was laid to rest in Paris, retired some years ago––where I’ll finally accept that there is nothing sacred or blessed about our marriage, if there ever was. We’ll both quietly realize that some people just aren’t meant to be together, that we could have saved ourselves a lot of hurt if we’d had the courage to accept that some things will always be broken. I’ll meet her on the steps of Cambridge Probate and Family Court, not far from where Marcia Kadish and Tanya McCloskey became the first gay couple to be legally wed in the United States almost seventeen years ago. My soon-to-be-ex-wife will bring one of the two men she thinks she might be in love with to the courthouse with her. Moral support. He’ll seem even more uncomfortable than I am, even though he’ll have home-court advantage. Incredibly, moments before we’re called forward by the judge, she’ll ask if we’re making a mistake. “You did,” I’ll whisper, even though I’ve no right to the moral high ground.
One last petty, needless cruelty. Of course, I don’t know any of this right now.
I’ve sold or given away most of my cheap, self-assembled furniture. I’ve shipped my scant belongings ahead of me on a cargo ship somewhere in the cold, boundless expanse of the Atlantic. I’ve said my goodbyes.
All that’s left for me to do is leave.
*
Thanks to the denial of admission that will remain on my federal immigration record long after I’m dead, every single time I return to the United States from overseas I am treated to what the Department of Homeland Security calls “Secondary Inspection.”
This involves being escorted into a large, windowless room in which immigration officers question international arrivals about their itineraries, their visas, their countries of origin. Secondary Inspection is typically reserved for those who arouse suspicion based on the color of their skin or the sound of their names; a strange, liminal space full of scared, mostly black and brown faces, all of us would-be ingredients for the melting pot. One by one, arrivals are called forward to explain themselves and their identities, to justify why they should be granted permission to enter. That’s the problem with trying to get into The Greatest Country in the World. Nobody is ever good enough.
Once called upon, you stand before an immigration officer sat behind a long desk that runs the length of the room, separating the waiting area in which suspicious travelers are detained, from the administrative area where the invisible bureaucracy of travel takes place. This desk stands almost a full foot taller than a person of average height, meaning the immigration officer, upon whose sole discretion your future depends, must look down on the person pleading their case. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. It is here that I answer their questions about my ex-wife, about my divorce, about my mother’s cancer, about my layover with J.K. Simmons in the Twin Cities. Once the immigration officer hears the specifics of what happened, when the humanity of my situation becomes apparent––that I was just a dumb, scared kid who was almost as terrified by the thought of being someone’s husband as he was by the thought that his mom was going to die––I am eventually permitted to enter, but America’s immigration system isn’t configured to recognize the humanity of aliens. There are a great many things the United States fails to recognize.
I knew that the price I would have to pay to start my new life in America––the cost of my admission ticket––would be high. But I had no idea how high.
I often tell myself I couldn’t have known that, when I left England forever, it would be the last time I’d see my mother in good health. She may have survived the cancer that threatened her life all those years ago, but she couldn’t escape the Alzheimer’s disease that runs in her––our–– family, that slowly turned her own mother into a helpless, frightened stranger. During my first couple of years in the United States, my father and I would speak on the phone twice a week.
Once Mum moved into the nursing home in which she would live for the last five years of her life, my father and I began speaking every day. He’d describe changes to my mother’s medication regimen, summarize meetings with her doctors, tell me excitedly of news headlines about promising clinical trials and experimental drugs. Slowly, gradually, the tone of my father’s reports changed; breakthroughs in medical science gave way to updates on whether Mum laughed during his visit that day, or how long she held his hand.
I couldn’t have known that watching funerals via online video feed would become normalized due to the global spread of a dangerous, airborne pathogen and the politicization of accepted science. One morning in April, I woke up at three ‘o clock and dressed in a cheap, mismatched suit to watch my mother’s modest memorial service on my laptop in my living room in Rhode Island. My mother’s casket was carried into the chapel to Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable,” my parents’ song. There were just two mourners in attendance: my father, and one of the carers who had grown close to my mother at the nursing home––we’ll call her J. In the video, they walk slowly up the central aisle between the rows of empty folding seats, my father leaning on his cane, before stopping at my mother’s closed casket. My father rests a hand on the pale wood, his head lowered. For a moment it appears that his legs might give way, but J supports him, an arm around his shoulders. My father shakes his head, barely perceptible on the grainy video feed, before stroking Mum’s casket one last time. They pause for a moment, before walking out the way they came in. The service lasted less than four minutes. The video feed cut out as soon as my father and J left the frame, before the song even ended. I didn’t even have time to cry for her.
My father and I still speak every day. We could, if we chose, see each other on-screen rather than talk on the phone. Like many people of his generation, my father lacks confidence with modern technology but enjoys the conveniences it offers, everyday luxuries that were almost unthinkable when he was a younger man. But we don’t. We’ve never openly said so, but I think we both know that seeing each other’s faces would make our strange, international relationship that much harder. There’s a detached, distant safety to the telephone. We don’t have to see each other frown or cry or grow old. My father tells me often that he’s proud of me, that I’ve done well to make a new life for myself. Sometimes, I believe him.
I tell myself that it wasn’t my debilitating fear of Secondary Inspection or being turned away from my adoptive home that prevented me from paying my respects to the woman who loved me more than anyone else in the world, that stopped me from being there for my newly widowed father. It wasn’t my fault. It was the virus. But America is a terrifying place, and fear is a powerful motivator. Spend enough time here and you come to realize that fear defines virtually every aspect of American life. Fear of losing your job, of losing your health insurance, of losing your home or your car or your children. Fear of mass shootings and ruinous medical bills. Fear of equal rights and government overreach and critical race theory. Fear that someone will get one over on you before you can get one over on them. Fear that someone––especially an immigrant––will take what’s rightfully yours, whether your underpaid job or your stolen land or your fraudulent cultural birthright, when they don’t deserve it. But hey, as many Americans are fond of saying, if I don’t like it, I can leave. If only it were that simple.
Originally from the United Kingdom, Dan Shewan is a nonfiction writer who now lives and works in Rhode Island. Dan’s essays and narrative nonfiction have appeared in a wide range of publications, including Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Full Stop, Literary Mama, and Pithead Chapel, among others.
