We sit across the street, a dozen old people,
silently on our camp chairs in the snow, facing
the building where they digitize a certain
segment of reality, rattling keyboards, stoking
the engines of cruelty with their fingers. Its round belly's
flanked by two blunt wings, two stories, long and low,
facade of salmon brick with horizontal stripes of
darker, glazed masonry - hue of raspberry? blood?
A layer cake of vanilla bureaucracy. Mirrored windows
conceal the eyes of whoever within may look out from
behind reflections of trees' crooked, bare branches
silhouetted against the silvery sky. Our signs,
hand-lettered on cardboard and scraps of plywood, speak
for us to the passing traffic, saying, "STOP THECRUELTY",
saying, "LOVE THE MIGRANT AS YOU LOVE YOURSELF", and
(pointing an arrow at the architectural bauble)
"ICE FEDERAL DATA CENTER". The last, because the
building declines to name itself. Directly across the
street from us, the building's door, access restricted to
those who know what numbers to punch on the keypad
beside it. It shimmers open. Through it, a portly man
d'un certain age, tall in his black cloth coat, steps
onto the sidewalk and quickly turns aside without
casting a glance at us. They always keep their eyes
away from us. Not so, the many among the hundreds
rolling through the hour when we are here each week, who
nod and smile and give thumbs up and honk their horns.
We sit, impassive, meditating - well, it's hard
not to smile, wave back; and sometimes, some of us do.
They pass like dreams, along with darker thoughts. The building
sometimes seems to swell to house all evil; sometimes
fills with ordinary people drinking coffee
at their desks, typing, chatting, daydreaming; sometimes
sits impassively, inanimate; and sometimes
disappears, replaced by meadow grass and flowers
such as nodded here before and will again.
Only archived records will retain its footprint.
I imagine children picnicking, centuries hence.
Slowly, a battered, blue pickup truck approaches
on our side of the road, and crawls to a stop between us
and the object of our meditations. The driver -
male, white, twentyish, dark hair, Beatles cut -
rolls his window down and leans across to crane his
head out, opens his mouth, and yells, no, screams, the words
rasping in his throat, "Fuck you! Get a life!
Get a job! You're going to die soon, anyway!
You fucking old pieces of shit!" Then he starts to throw
bits of trash at us: a clear, plastic cup with the
bright pink dregs of a drink; a plastic box sans sandwich;
a crumpled paper receipt; other odds and ends
left over from his lunch. None reaches us. We sit,
unmoving as buildings, until he has driven away. And then,
too late, we remember that, in our stoic calm, or perhaps
in shock's paralysis, we've neglected to note his vehicle's
license number. Next time, will we? If there is one.
Imagine being so upset by a handful of elders
quietly sitting outdoors, looking at a building.
Meanwhile, the nation answers not to us, but to him.
