Open City by Teju Cole Page A

my shoulder. My thoughts were scattered: I was thinking about her, and about the other girl, and about the young man with whom I had had a long conversation earlier that afternoon. I had gone on the Welcomers trip on Nadège’s invitation; she had mentioned it to me, and it seemed an interesting way to getto know her better. Her church organized bimonthly visits to a detention facility in Queens in which undocumented immigrants were held. I showed interest, and when she asked me to come along the following Sunday, I agreed. I met her and the rest of the group, a mix of human-rights types and church ladies, in the basement of the cathedral. Their priest, who gave the blessing, wore no shoes, a practice he had picked up during his long years of service in a rural parish in the Orinoco. Nadège said he had done it out of solidarity with the peasants he served, but that he continued to be shoeless in New York to remind himself and others of their plight. I asked her if he was a Marxist, but she didn’t know. The shoeless priest did not come with us to Queens. Most of the group, on the day I went, were women, many with that beatific, slightly unfocused expression one finds in do-gooders. We were on a chartered bus driven by the same route one would take from upper Manhattan to La Guardia Airport and were on the road for an hour, through slow traffic, until we came to South Jamaica.
    It was early summer, but the view was grim, a landscape of wire fences, parked cars, and disused construction equipment. When we came to an industrial-looking area about a mile from the airport proper, weeds grew out of the road and furred the open culverts, and the buildings all looked prefabricated, with aluminum siding as if to blend them into the ugly landscape. I must have seen them before, these buildings at the far end of a tarred field, some of the larger ones of which were used as hangars or repair shops, on previous trips to the airport. But had I seen them, I would have just as quickly forgotten them; they seemed designed not to be noticed. And so also with the detention facility itself, a long, gray metal box, a single-story building that had been contracted out to Wackenhut, a private firm, under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security. We came to a halt in a vast parking lot behind it.
    It was then that I saw Nadège’s uneven walk. It was, in a sense,the first time I had really seen her: the slanting afternoon light, the vicious landscape of wire fencing and broken concrete, the bus like a resting beast, the way she moved her body in compensation for a malformation. When we came around to the front of the metal building, we saw a large crowd standing in a long line. People carried plastic bags and small boxes, and near the head of the line, a security guard explained loudly to a couple who seemed to speak little or no English that visiting hours had not begun yet, and would not begin for another ten minutes. The guard made a great show of his exasperation, and the couple looked both apologetic and dissatisfied. The Welcomers group joined the line, which appeared to consist of recent immigrants: Africans, Latinos, Eastern Europeans, Asians. These were the people, in other words, who would have cause to visit someone at a detention facility. A middle-aged man shouted into a cellphone in Polish. The wind was cool, and it soon became cold. The line did not move for twenty-five minutes; then it moved and, one at a time, we showed our ID cards, passed through the metal detectors, and were let into the waiting room. Everyone, with the exception of the Welcomers, seemed to be there to see family members. The security officers—oversize, bored, brusque-mannered people, people who made no pretense of enjoying their work—took the visitors, a half dozen at a time, behind secured doors for forty-five minute visits. Those waiting their turn were mostly silent, staring into space. No one was reading. That purgatorial waiting room