Free The Weight of Shadows by José Orduña Page B

others. It allows him the luxury of walking around unencumbered by others’ perceptions of him and leaves him free of having to calculate what those might be in order to sustain his very life. His exterior is one of the templates for what we think of as an American. Bob is astute, so he’s perfectly awarethat his Bob suit gives him power, which is why I think he always offers to drive whenever we hang out. Over the course of our relationship he’s relayed a few stories about times when he calmly talked his way out of hairy situations that I’m sure would have turned out very differently for me.
    Bob and I also frequent a taco place where I recently pointed out something that I noticed a while back: when I wear a mustache, paisas will greet me in Spanish, but when I have a full beard or am cleanly shaven they usually wait for me to say something first or they’ll begin in English. I first observed this in high school, during summer breaks, when I started making forays into growing facial hair. Besides the different greetings I’d receive from other Latin Americans, I noticed white girls paid less attention to me. In stores, it seemed white people would ask me where things were more frequently, and when I told them I wasn’t an employee they’d either look very surprised, somewhat amused, or intensely embarrassed. The strangest thing, though, was some white people seemed to lose the ability to see me at all, as though I held no physical space in a room, as though I had no materiality with which to displace air or cast shadows.
    â€œBob, do you think I should shave this moustache before my appointment?”
    â€œYes.”
    Ariel is not supposed to be here, according to my valentine. “WARNING! Due to limited seating availability in our lobby areas, only persons who are necessary to assist with transportation or completing the fingerprint worksheet should accompany you.” I look up from my notebook and there are two women who might be African sitting a few seats away, next to each other. I don’t think they’re here together because one is wearing a solid purple head wrap that’s tightly twisted around her head, while the other woman’s isshiny and voluminous, and looks like a
gele
. The room we’re in looks like it could fit hundreds comfortably, but there are only five people in here including Ariel. One of the women smiles warmly at me, and nods her head, which I take to mean she’s happy for me—happy I’ve made it here to this room—because she knows the value of the papers dispensed through this office. But it feels Faustian to voluntarily become an “American” in this historical moment, and it feels funny to be relieved about no longer being deportable by the same state that can still easily kill me “legally” and with absolute impunity.
    I feel stuck in the eternal return of the circumstances into which I was born. The arbitrariness of where I came into being is reified by and as institutions, which themselves are in the process of becoming more immaterial, more abstract through secrecy and the yet unknowable consequences of emerging technology. The Department of Homeland Security works with countless private partners with little oversight. They have numbers they’d like to meet, and the details are left to the subcontractors. Iris scans, enhanced facial recognition tracking, full hand geometry. But who exactly will have access to the biometric data of hundreds of millions of people, now and in the future? How did something like IDENT come online without even the semblance of informed consent?
    The operational paradigm is broad interoperability, which means the free exchange of information and services between diverse government systems. It means fusion centers within local police precincts that aggregate mass amounts of data from a variety of public- and private-sector sources operating under the auspices of national