In my defense, I was not alone. Most members of the bourgeoisie experience history as they do their heartbeats: they know it’s there but only become aware of its presence when something goes wrong. Neither I nor my peers in the “creative class” of that faux-meritocratic New York understood that the Obama years were precisely that — years, an era among others, a period with a beginning and an end. The time that I spent as one of New York’s half-million aspiring writers was the product of a wild confluence of improbabilities — the financial crisis was over; Facebook’s algorithms began favoring news stories; a vacancy opened in a rent-stabilized building in South Slope; the United States government approved some three hundred thousand work visas — and yet I rode the subway twice a day believing that these coincidences were as unremarkable as the coming of spring after winter.

In the previous weeks and months I had begun to wonder whether my profession, for all its insistence on the value of facts, was not in the last instance dependent on dishonesty. If I pretended to care about the boy’s discovery of parkour and death metal, it was because I hoped that my kindness would lull him into feeling comfortable enough to tell me about the most painful moments of his life. I had told him and his guardian that I intended to write an article based on our conversations, but my disclosure, though accurate in a strict sense, obscured the nature of my intentions. What I should have said was that I intended to repackage the boy’s trauma into a digestible narrative I hoped would capture the attention of some hundred thousand internet users, who would then surrender valuable information about themselves to one or another technology baron, who would then reward the website for which I worked with a better starting position in the algorithmic rat race, which would allow the website’s owners to convince a handful of investors to keep funding the company, which in turn would allow my editors to pay me a salary, earn me accolades, and, eventually, if all went well, convince the US government that I deserved to live and work in this country. The boy was for me not an end but a means, and lately thoughts of that nature had been bothering me often enough that I wondered whether I shouldn’t do something else with my life.

I sank into the thought as into a pool of oil-slicked seawater. All of a sudden in place of the boy with the spiked hair I saw hundreds of faces, some of which I recognized from the photographs that accompanied the earliest press reports on the concentration camps: children, multitudes of them, some too young to walk, others old enough to understand what was happening, torn from their parents, kept in cages, confined for months on end to makeshift cities where every room was windowless like the room where I sat, where they were neglected, treated like cattle, injected with antipsychotics, expected to follow orders and sign papers in a language that they didn’t understand, lied to, misfed, kept away from fresh air, from joy, from beauty, from the petty miseries that are the daily bread of lives that have not been destroyed by imperialism—the quotidian unhappiness, the vague dissatisfaction, the boring, benign, intolerable anxiety that is the privilege of white people.

Told to BREAK THE SILENCE.

Told to REPORT CONFIDENTIALLY.

Told to GET HELP.

Told to KEEP DETENTION SAFE.

I saw their faces, and the faces of their parents, their uncles and aunts, their siblings, their cousins, their friends, the lovers that some of them would have, the children that some of them would have, the multitudes who had been touched and would be touched by the horror of that crime, and the sight made me furious, because along with the faces I saw with perfect clarity that none of it was preordained, that none of it was necessary, that the destruction of all those lives had been the product of a choice, a conscious one, made by a handful of hateful people empowered by a hateful nation and carried out by an army of uniformed nobodies who had credit card bills to pay. The knowledge that those responsible did not know what they did offered no consolation. If anything, it made the crime more painful to contemplate, because it made it absurd. The world teetered between redeemable and irredeemable tragedy; the stakes were nothing less than life’s worth; every new horror risked plunging humanity into a desert with no way stations at all.

What was this desire I felt to kiss her hands? She was declining to subject me to petty humiliations, it was true, but if that was my definition of kindness then I had lost most of my self-respect. No, I thought, this was not gratitude; it was Stockholm syndrome. I should never have been detained, not even for an hour. In fact, nobody should ever be detained. I lived on a continent shaped by genocide, slavery, and the forced displacement of millions. In light of that history, no fiction could be more false, or more dangerous, than borders. The countries that tried to prevent people from crossing the arbitrary lines between them were acting on no justification beyond brute force, the basest sort of power, that which is born from the jawbone of a donkey or the barrel of a gun.

The story now seemed simple: I had remade myself in the image of the rulers of the empire, hoping that if I came to resemble them closely enough they would welcome me as one of their own. With the years, even I had come to believe my own charade and convinced myself that I had more in common with white Americans than with most Mexicans. As it turned out, I had fooled no one but myself—not the Mexicans, not the white Americans, and certainly not the US government. There was no denying it anymore: I loved America more than myself, but America did not love me back. And yet there I was, standing at the inspection desk in the secondary screening room at the San Francisco International Airport, hoping that America would change its mind.