Charlotte Brady, Contributor

She hates it. 26 Federal Plaza. The letter is in her bag. As soon as she sees the address in print it makes her cringe. The INS - Immigration and Naturalization Services - is like a huge colossus of sticky bureaucratic glue. You're not getting anywhere.

Eva is part-fearful, part-annoyed at having to be here today. What if her passport disappears? What if somebody deletes her case? She also has a lot of work to do, productive work. Some designs that need to be sent off to clients.

INS has taught her to hate bureaucracy. It is the same in every country, everywhere, but the INS has given her a crash course. Bureaucracy never fails to create dishonest a-kissers out of decent people and power-hungry Gestapo wannabes out of ordinary men. Is this where we're at, she thinks, as humans? She is amazed how easily people conform to the situation. If there are a-kissers there will be Gestapo soldiers, and vice versa. It's a law of nature. At 26 Federal Plaza you are considered an illiterate idiot, no matter who you are. At least it's democratic, she thinks. And there is not much else to do.

Except wait in endless lines you are not really sure why you are in. Everything seems arbitrary, handled on a whim. You are told to wait in another line ... and then another line ... until you think, for sure you will never be able to do what you came to do. Then you are told to sit. Wait. Be quiet.

No eating.

No drinking.

No walking around.

Even if you have to be there all day. No eating. No drinking.

Not that you get that hungry, anyway. The air itself is nauseating. There are bathrooms but you don't want to risk missing your turn and then having to go through the whole procedure again. Eva imagines the insults she would have to face. What punishment would they come up with? Would they make her spend an extra day? Psychological torture. Warfare. Maybe it is all a plan to have undesirable elements withdraw their applications? She laughs at the paranoid thought, then stops. You probably shouldn't be laughing at 26 Federal Plaza. It might be considered a threat, or at least an offence of some sort.

She has been staring at it for over an hour now. Relentlessly her eyes are drawn to it. No matter where they start they come back to the poster. It is hanging, slightly tilted, on a wall painted in bureaucracy beige. A palm tree leaning over a turquoise ocean, the crown gently kissing the white velvet sand.

The ultimate dream. As it has been dreamed a million times.

If that isn't paradise, paradise can't possibly exist. She has seen it before, in doctors' offices, tax offices, waiting areas, often really drab places where someone probably felt a little dreaming of paradise was needed.

The waiting room is big, with hundreds of plastic chairs lined up for everybody who hopes to one day belong in this country. Guards tell people not to stand, not to sit on the windowsills, not to wander away. People are insulted, detested, dehumanised. Diminished into little black holes of spit. There is nothing to do but sit on your plastic chair and listen to the recorded number system. Number A227, at Window 18. El numero A dos cientos veinte siete. En ventranilla diez y ocho.

There were simultaneously three series of A, B and C numbers being called. In the old system the employees had to yell out foreign-sounding names that sounded even more foreign in their mouths. Some names never made it to the back of the room. Now there was at least a number system. But nothing had really changed. It was all on the surface. The only thing that changed when the INS was transformed to USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) was that they got a fancy website where you were supposed to be able to locate your case, but never could, and that the recorded phone message, when you tried to call them, was nicer. Sometimes your call even got through and you could speak to a real person.

She had come early, maybe 45 minutes before they opened at 7:30. Still, she had to wait in line for an hour and a half before she even got inside the building. It was raining. It was cold. She didn't have an umbrella.

Once inside it was the usual procedure of taking off your jacket, emptying your pockets, and then passing through a metal detector. After that she was shepherded to another line where she was supposed to get information on where she would have to go to get the stamp in her passport that she needed to travel.

There was a guard there who kept repeating, time after time: 'Everybody in line. Have your letter ready. If there's an emergency go to Window Number 2. An emergency means a sick relative, a funeral. A trip is not an emergency.'

People came with whole families. Babies and grandmas with tired legs. Nobody could sit. 'Everybody in line. Have your letter ready. If there's an emergency go to Window Number 2. An emergency means a sick relative, a funeral. A trip is not an emergency.' She waited another 45 minutes and, after she had left the window, realized she had forgotten to ask something. She went back. A loud voice cut through the room:

'What do you think you're doing?'

She waited patiently for the new person at the window to be finished so she could ask what she had forgotten to ask.

'What do you think you're doing? Get in line! Ma'am, I'm talking to you.'

Confused, she turned around and realised the angry guard was talking to her; that she was in fact the 'Ma'am' he was referring to.

'I said, get in line!' His loud voice pronounced every little syllable with whiplash force.

'Oh, I'm sorry, but I was here just now and I realised that I forgot to ask something. I'm just goingto ...'

Before she could finish he cut her off. 'I said, get in line. Get in line. Is there anything you don't understand about that? That's the rule. You cannot just go up and speak to an official.'

'Yes, yes, I understand. I just ...'

'Yes, you're just going to get in line!'

He yelled the last words. She calmly walked all the way to the back of the line, which now had grown considerably. She would have to wait for at least another hour or two. There was absolutely nothing she could do but to stand in line again.

She watched the guard. He kept repeating his script. 'Everybody in line. Have your letter ready. If there's an emergency go to Window Number two. An emergency means a sick relative, a funeral. A trip is not an emergency.' Every time somebody didn't know where to go he yelled. His yelling made them even more confused. They didn't understand what rule they had broken. She saw old people looking confused and afraid.

'Where are you going? Do you have an emergency? That's not an emergency. Get in line!' There was no understanding, no kind words, which was surprising since many of the employees seemed to be recent immigrants themselves. The message was clear: Come to America, get in line, and then get a job at the USCIS to be rude to little sh-ts just like yourself, only now you don't have to be a little sanymore, you can upgrade to a medium sized one. Congratulations!

When she had been in line again for about ten minutes the guard lifted the divider and gestured for her to come forward to the window. She heard herself say: 'Oh, the rules have changed?' She immediately realised her mistake and bit her tongue, but too late: the insult was already polluting the air. How stupid of her. Why couldn't she just have smiled a grateful smile? Oh, no, not her. She had to be sarcastic. Why couldn't she just have kissed his arse like everybody else?

'Do you want to come or not?' he said with a look on his face that told her that he knew full well he didn't have to do anything for her. He did it because he had the power to do it and she should be thankful and quiet. Healso had the power to throw her out. He had given her his grace and she had spat at it.

'Yes, yes, I'm sorry,' she said quietly, trying to polish his grace to make it look new again. He silently held up the divider and she went to ask her question, her eyes glued to the ground.

She is directed to the third floor, Room Number 816, and this is where she finds herself now, looking at the poster, listening to the number system. She has handed in her passport and has been waiting for two hours by now. It is impossible to find out how long it will take. The dreary beige makes her sleepy; she keeps yawning. When she very politely had asked how long approximately it would take, the tired official had given her a blank stare with a focus somewhere behind her on the grey linoleum floor and simply said: 'Please take a seat.' The collar on his shirt is fraying and the fabric is a faded blue. His face is ashen, deeply lined. He is wearing a tie with the Camel character on it. The moose. She recognises it from one of the huge electrical billboards in Times Square. At least he hadn't yelled at her.

The paradise poster reminds her of her trip. Hot sun on her body. The sound of waves, like breaths, eternal. Him.

She has to remind herself why she is here, in this sickening place. The ring on her finger has something of the ocean in it. She could be in paradise instead.

It is all because of New York. The New York fairy had descended on her and made her life successful and fun, even glamorous, she thought when she tried to picture herself from the outside. That counted for something. A lot. Maybe it wasn't paradise - the USCIS certainly wasn't - but it was hers, all hers. She had created it herself, out of her dreams, like so many before her. So what if she needs to spend a day at the USCIS?

A pregnant woman starts crying next to her. She is speaking to a fellow applicant. 'I don't know what to do. They tell me to come back tomorrow. I won't get my passport now. Oh, I don't know what to do. I'm eight months pregnant andthere's a risk of miscarriage. The doctor said I should be on bed rest. I can't come back tomorrow. They just won't do it now. I don't know what to do.'

The tragedies the employees had to harden themselves against. The lies they had to see through. Maybe because they couldn't distinguish between what was lies and what was true they could never really do anything outside of the official routine. The result seemed heartless.

There were friends with cases that had been lost. They were living in limbo, unable to travel anywhere outside of the U.S. One friend hadn't been able to visit her parents for eight years, until her grandfather died and she was granted an exemption to travel for the funeral her husband was a citizen, their children born Americans, she was still living like a refugee. Like somebody who had committed a crime and wasn't allowed to leave the country before the trial.

Another friend had been granted the dubious title of Temporary Permanent Resident, without any explanation as how something permanent possibly could be temporary. She hadn't yet been married two years to her American husband when she filed for a Green Card. She had to file again; the whole process all over again. Even though they had two toddlers together, their union was suspected.

Again, the question of truth. It had to be dealt with. The officials followed a script.

Eva is lucky. Her employer-sponsored case has taken only four years, so far. And she can travel. She only needs to renew her stamp once a year, which is what she is doing right now. Maybe in one or two more years she will have her Green Card.

When she is finally out it is close to two. She breathes in the air, a feeling of freedom. She loves New York. She loves New Yorkers. Inside, the sheep are still being shepherded around. She is the one that managed to escape. She is running free.

She wants to go for lunch, as far away from 26 Federal Plaza as she can. It's a whole year before she needs to go back again.

She pretends it's never.

END

- Charlotte Brady