There’s just something about me and that play that was meant to be. In Jamaica, the Daily called my performance miraculous. I got a standing ovation.
Me. Not the other actors. Me alone.
Is a funny thing. That play send me to America, and now it sending me back to Jamaica.
Patricia ask me how me could tell the cop all our business. Him not no preacher, she say. It not no confession, she say. I tell her I was just drunk and coming off the stage high. The highest thing you can do is the thing God put you on this earth to do.
I tell her I didn’t mean to do it. And is true what I tell her, but the opposite true too. Maybe I do it on purpose. This not no confession. I just saying that the thought is there in my mind. Maybe I do it on purpose. We couldn’t even fill all the seats in the place.
America done with me and I done with it. More than anything, that night remind me. In Jamaica I got a standing ovation. In America I can’t get an audience.
I don’t know. Maybe I do it on purpose. You can get lost in you own mind, like you gone to another country. All you thoughts in another language and you can’t read the signs even though they everywhere all around you.
THE FIRST THING I SEE on his desk is a file with Natasha’s name on it. Natasha Kingsley, it says. It has to be her, right? How many Natasha Kingsleys could there be? Not only are our meetings in the same building, but also her lawyer and my interviewer are the same person? The odds have to be astronomical, right? I can’t wait to see the look on her face when I tell her.
I look up at him and then around the office for other signs. “Are you an immigration lawyer?” I ask.
He looks up from what I presume is my application. “I am. Why?”
“I think I know one of your clients,” I say, and pick up the file.
He snatches it away from me. “Don’t touch that. It’s privileged.” He pulls it as far away from me as possible.
I grin at Fitzgerald and he frowns back at me. “Yeah, sorry,” I say. “It’s just you saved my life.”
“What are you talking about?” He flexes his right wrist and I notice that his hand is bandaged. Now I remember that his paralegal said he’d been in a car accident.
I point at the file. “I just met her—Natasha—today.”
He’s still frowning at me, not getting it. “When I met her she was being deported, but then she met with you and you did your lawyer magic, and now she’s going to stay.”
He rests the bandaged hand on his desk. “And how did that save your life?”
“She’s the One,” I say.
He frowns. “Didn’t you say you just met her today?”
“Yup.” I can’t do anything about the big smile on my face.
“And she’s the One?” He doesn’t actually put air quotes around “the One,” but I can hear them in his voice. Vocal air quotes (not better than actual air quotes).
He steeples his fingers and stares at me for a good long while. “Why are you here?” he asks.
Is this a trick question? “For my admission interview?”
He looks me over pointedly. “No, really. Why are you here in my office right now? You obviously don’t care about this interview. You show up here looking like you’ve been in a brawl. It’s a serious question. Why did you come here?”
There’s no way to answer this but honestly. “My parents made me.”
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
He looks down at my file. “It says here that you’re interested in the pre-med track. Are you?”
“Not really,” I say.
“Not really or no?” Lawyers like certainty.
“No.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” he says. “Do you want to go to Yale?”
“I don’t even know if I want to go to college.”
He leans forward in his chair. I feel like I’m being cross-examined. “And what’s your big dream?”
“To be a poet.”
“Oh good,” he says. “Something practical.”
“Believe it or not, I’ve heard that one before.”
He leans in even more. “I’ll ask you again. Why are you here?”
“I have to be.”
“No you don’t,” he fires back. “You can just get up and walk out that door.”
“I owe it to my parents.”
“Why?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
I sigh (long-suffering variety). “My parents are immigrants. They moved to this country for a better life. They work all the time so my brother and I can have the American Dream. Nowhere in the American Dream does it say you can skip college and become a starving artist.”
“It says whatever you want it to.”
I snort. “Not in my family it doesn’t. If I don’t do this, I get cut off. No funds for college. No nothing.”
This confession at least stops his rapid-fire questioning. He leans back in his chair. “Would they really do that?” he asks.
I know the answer, but I can’t make myself say it right away. I think about my dad’s face earlier this afternoon. He’s so determined that Charlie and I have a better life than he did. He’ll do anything to guarantee it.
“Yes,” I say. “He would.” But not because he’s evil. And not because he’s a Stereotypical Korean Parent. But because he can’t see past his own history to let us have ours.
A lot of people are like that.
Fitzgerald whistles low. “So I guess you have to be sure the poetry thing is worth it.”