Don't Get Too Comfortable Read Free

is a feeling more unrooted than mere statelessness. It's as though all my moorings have been cut. Any connection that I might have had to anything or anyone has been, for the moment, severed. It's a cold realization that I am now, as indeed I always have been, an official unit of one.
    COINCIDENTALLY, CANADIAN-BORN newscaster Peter Jennings also became a citizen around the same time, after almost forty years in the United States. According to the papers, his swearing in took place in a swanky Manhattan courthouse. I, on the other hand, am forced to catch the 6:55 a.m. train to Hempstead, Long Island. My friend Sarah, a self-described civics nerd, very sweetly agrees to come with me. She is a good deal more excited than I am. This all feels like monumentally bad timing, or possibly the entirely wrong move altogether. Just two days prior, the front page of the paper had two news stories. The first was about how Canada was on the brink of legalizing gay marriage, and the second told of an appeals court in the District of Columbia Circuit that ruled that the detainees at Guantánamo Bay are legally outside the reach of the protections of the Constitution.
    The INS center, a one-story sprawl devoid of character, fits into its very unprepossessing surroundings of a highway of strip malls with empty storefronts. Still, the air is electric with a sense of occasion as we line up at the door. No one has come alone and people are dressed to the nines. We are separated from our friends and family and pass through the final sheep dip before becoming Americans. I have to answer once again whether, in the intervening four weeks between my interview and now, I have become a dipsomaniac, a whore, or traveled backward in time to willingly participate in Kristallnacht. They take back my green card, which after ten years is barely holding up. It was always government property. There is a strange lightness I feel having turned in the small laminated object that has been on my person for an entire decade. Something has been lanced. For the brief walk from this anteroom to the main auditorium, I am a completely undocumented human. The only picture ID I have is my gym membership and it has my name spelled wrong.
    There is absolutely nothing on the walls of the huge fluorescent-lit, dropped-ceiling room into which we are corralled. It's the new federalist architecture. Even travel agencies give out free posters of the Grand Canyon or the Chicago loop at night. Alternately, how hard could it be to get a bunch of schoolchildren in to paint a lousy mural of some politically neutral rainbows and trees? Our guests are already seated way in the back; I cannot find Sarah in the sea of faces. I am grateful for the newspaper I have brought with me as it takes well over an hour for everyone to register and find their seats. Across the aisle from me, one of my fellow soon-to-be new citizens has a paperback. He is reading
American Psycho.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to read about a murderous yuppie dispatching live rodents into women's vaginas. Welcome, friend.
    I catnap a little and one of the guards turns on a boom box perched on a chair for the musical prelude. A typical pompy instrumental of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” followed by a very atypical “America the Beautiful” rendered in a minor-key full-strings orchestration straight out of a forties noir. Three women and one man then get up on the dais. The man checks that everyone has turned in all their documents. It's a minor federal offense to keep them. “Your old passports from the countries you came from are souvenirs and can never be used again.” The people in the back are instructed to applaud loudly, people with cameras are told to take lots of pictures. There is pretty well only joy in this room, save for some extreme Canadian ambivalence.
    They lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. I leave off “under God” as I say it. Oh, maverick! I feel about as renegade