Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I can’t take the credit card. It’s got somebody else’s name on it.”

I looked. My name, which by a miracle of typography was fully spelled out on my social security card, is Johannus Franciscus Hendrikus van den Broek. My credit card, for obvious reasons, identified me merely as Johannus F. H. van den Broek — exactly as my green card did.

I said, “That’s my name. If you—”

“I don’t want to talk about it. Go see the supervisor. Counter ten. Next.”

I went to counter ten. There were three people already in line. Each had an argument with the supervisor; each went away in a rage. Then it was my turn. The supervisor was in his late thirties, with a severely shaved head and a little goatee and an earring. He wordlessly extended his hand and I passed him my documents of identification. In exchange he passed me a notice: ALL FORMS OF IDENTIFICATION MUST SHOW THE SAME NAME.

He quickly compared my papers. “You got to show me documents with the same name,” he said. “This Con Ed bill is no good.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. I pulled out a bank statement I’d brought along in case of difficulty. It, too, was in the name of Johannus F. H. van den Broek, but it contained copies of checks I’d written. “You see?” I said. “The signature on those checks is exactly the same as the signature on my social security card and green card. So it’s obviously me in both cases.”

He shook his head. “I’m not a handwriting expert,” he said. “I need the same name.”

“OK,” I said calmly. “But let me ask you this. The green card’s good, right? And the name on the Con Ed bill and the bank statement is the same as the name on the green card.”

The supervisor reexamined my green card. “Actually, you got yourself another problem,” he said with a smile. “See this? The name on the green card is not the same as the name on the social security card.”

I looked: on the green card was typed “Johanus.” I’d never noticed it before.

I said, “Yes, well, that’s just an obvious clerical error made by the INS. The photograph on the green card is obviously me.” The supervisor looked unmoved, so I added, “Either that, or there’s somebody out there who looks exactly like me and has exactly the same name, and I happen to have stolen his green card.”

“Not exactly the same name,” the supervisor said. “And that’s where we have a problem. You want me to give you a learner permit? OK, but who are you? Are you Johanus”—he pronounced the last two syllables as an obscenity—“or are you Johannus?”

“Come on, let’s not play games,” I said.

“You think I’m playing a game?” He was actually baring his teeth. “Let me remind you, sir, you seem to be in possession of somebody else’s green card — either that, or somebody else’s social security card. I might just get suspicious about that. I might just have to start looking into that.”

This man was dangerous, I realized. I said, “You really want me to go down to the INS and get a new green card? That’s what you want to get out of this?”

“I don’t want you to go there,” the supervisor said. Now he was pointing at my chest. “I’m forcing you to go there.”

“What about my written test?” I said, pathetically showing him my twenty out of twenty.

He smiled. “You’re going to have to take it again.”

And so I was in a state of fuming helplessness when I stepped out into the inverted obscurity of the afternoon. As I stood there, thrown by Herald Square’s flows of pedestrians and the crazed traffic diagonals and the gray, seemingly bottomless gutter pools, I was seized for the first time by a nauseating sense of America, my gleaming adopted country, under the secret actuation of unjust, indifferent powers. The rinsed taxis, hissing over fresh slush, shone like grapefruits; but if you looked down into the space between the road and the undercarriage, where icy matter stuck to pipes and water streamed down the mud flaps, you saw a foul mechanical dark.

Corralled by the black snow ranged along the curbs, I found myself hastening, for lack of a clear alternative, to the triangular traffic island at Broadway and Thirty-second Street known as Greeley Square Park. Glowing orange Christmas lights peppered the trees. I came to a statue of one Horace Greeley, a newspaperman and politician of the nineteenth century and, the plaque at the statue’s base further asserted, the coiner of the phrase “Go West, young man, go West.” Greeley, apparently a fellow with an enormous egglike head, was seated in an armchair. Staring blindly into the void beyond his feet, he wore an expression of devastation, as if the newspaper he clutched in his right hand contained terrible news. I decided to walk homeward down Broadway. The route, unfamiliar to me, passed through the old Tin Pan Alley quarter, blocks now given over to wholesalers and street vendors and freight forwarders and import-exporters — UNDEFEATED WEAR CORP, SPORTIQUE, DA JUMP OFF, signs proclaimed — dealing in stuffed toys, caps, novelties, human hair, two-dollar belts, one-dollar neckties, silver, perfumes, leather goods, rhinestones, street-wear, watches. Arabs, West Africans, African Americans hung out on the sidewalks among goods trucks, dollies, pushcarts, food carts, heaped trash, boxes and boxes of merchandise. I might have been in a cold Senegal. Black-skinned buyers carrying garbage bags wandered in and out of the stores while overseers and barkers and hawkers, dressed in leather jackets, fur coats, African robes, and tracksuits, jingled keys and talked on cell phones and idly heckled passing women and shouted for custom. On Twenty-seventh Street I turned toward Fifth Avenue: the cold had gotten to me, and I’d decided to catch a taxi. As I approached Fifth my eye was drawn to a banner hanging from a second-floor window: CHUCK CRICKET, INC.

The names of various enterprises were taped to a signboard at the front of the building’s entrance: Peruvian Amity Society, Apparitions International, Elvis Tookey Boxing, and, at suite 203, Chuck Cricket, Inc., Chuck Import-Export, Inc., and Chuck Industries, Inc. Why not? I thought, and went in. On the second floor I entered a tiny lobby with a receptionist who sat behind a security glass next to a video monitor that colorlessly transmitted, in jerking four-second fragments, dismal images of stairs, elevator interiors, and passageways. The receptionist buzzed me in without a word. I walked down a narrow corridor covered in teal carpeting and knocked on the door of suite 203.

Chuck himself opened the door, a telephone at his ear. He tapped on the back of a chair and gestured for me to sit. He seemed wholly unsurprised to see me.

The office consisted of a room with space for a couple of desks and a few filing cabinets. Sheetrock walls were decorated with posters of Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara, the greatest batsmen in the world. A strumming sound drifted through from a guitar instructor next door. Chuck winked at me as he dealt with his call. “It’s my wife,” he mouthed. He wore an open-collared shirt and neatly creased trousers that spilled generously over sneakers. I noticed for the first time a couple of large gold rings on his fingers and, running in the dark hair beneath his throat, a necklace’s gold drool.

I was startled, in the midst of these impressions, by a strange whistling sound. The whistling was followed, after a few seconds’ pause, by a fresh sequence of chirps, and then by a popping like the pop of a bouncing Ping-Pong ball.

Chuck passed over a CD case. We were listening to Disc Two of Bird Songs of California: Olive-Sided Flycatcher through Varied Thrush.

As I waited for Chuck to finish his phone call, the muffled guitar music and the birdsong were joined by the ringing of a phone from the other adjoining office. A male voice sounded loudly: “Hello?” The voice came through again: “I’m not a mind reader. I can’t read your mind.” A pause. “Stop it. Just stop it. Would you please just stop it.” Another pause. “Fuck you, all right? Fuck you.” I lowered my eyes. Paper glue traps for mice, baited with peanut butter and bearing the words ASSURED ENVIRONMENTS, littered the space under the radiators.