The taste was dry and sweet.

No, I don't know what that's supposed to mean, either.

It’s 8:30 on a quiet Monday night; in the darkness of a Republic night outside, songbirds on the wing are bursting into oily flames, for the temperature outside hasn’t yet dropped below 90 degrees. Nuns are openly cursing in the streets; dogs are forming into packs and have begun to hunt the weak and the defenseless for sport. The moment I step outside, I begin to schvitz like a summer pudding at a cheaply catered bar mitzvah and I start to fantasize about swimming buck-nekkid off the rockbound coast of Labrador. I wasn’t meant for this kind of weather. I’m meant, apparently, to hew large blocks of pressed permasnow into windproof lairs for myself and my mammal-skin-enveloped loved ones, spending my days harpooning hefty pinnipeds so that I may pass the sunless winter months gnawing upon their briny, hardened sinews. Instead, I am girding myself in long-sleeved dress-shirts, long pants and shiny sun-sucking black dress shoes in heat that brings me closer to understanding how, when the furnace-hot sirocco blows across the Mediterranean to Italy and Greece, the murder rates in those two fairly “I don’t really give a shit” nations soar exponentially. About seven years ago, a woman in the proclaimed “Armpit of Italy”, the Adriatic port of Bari, was said to have stabbed her cheating husband to death with a sharpened wedge of acutely aged parmesan, stopping only when her arm got tired. It makes me ache inside: nowhere in America could we find cheese that could take that kind of assault. Genius, pure genius.

Of course, I am wearing layers and finery because of my shiny new job, a week of which I have passed without being slain. I knew that, with the position and the fancy quasi-governmental accoutrements that came with it that I would have to dress less like a lumberjack, but I clearly wasn’t reckoning on it feeling like a crematorium outside. I find myself getting in my car, having scampered like an emu on methadone to get to it and shrieking in that tiny rainforest green microwave hell until the AC kicks in; once I actually get to work, I get out of my car and swear like a pirate until I am safely inside, where the cool air gives me back my precious dignity and my humble humanity. Needless to say, when, at around ten this morning the AC in Franklin Hall shuddered, sputtered, and with a final death-rattle, stopped working altogether, I began to fear for the safety of my coworkers and the internationals we’ve come to know and love. For, like the man who fears the advent of the full moon and the lycanthropic melee that accompanies said event, I cannot be held accountable for what I do and say when I am too hot to care. Plus, even if I am in an air-conditioned room or not, if I hear one more person say “It’s not the heat! It’s the humidity!” as if this were more profound than the translation of Mayan codices or finding the secret to turning cat litter into uranium, I will be wearing an attractive uvula necklace by that nightfall.

It was a good week. It took me all of thirteen seconds to nest myself completely in my new boy-cave in the belfry of Franklin Hall, having already mentally plotted how I was going to arrange and decorate it mere nanoseconds after I was offered the position. Of course, the seemingly effortless way in which I decorated my new office was, in fact, a Herculean battle of wills with myself. No, I reckoned, they don’t want you to bring in your Aztec human-sacrifice skull paperweight. No, they probably would find your graven bronze of Kali, the goddess of vengeance, a little macabre. Your wee stuffed Blackbeard doll? Best left at home. In the end, though, I’ve created an environment that stimulates me; my business cards rest in a rickshaw and I drink my coffee out of a mug that is a hideous human visage (a nineteenth-century ugly-mug from Conner Prairie), and nobody can stop me. I can already feel myself grow professionally; today, I got to sign my first Department of Homeland Security-ilk travel document for a young Indian woman, and I’ve already used my newfound power as a Designated School Official to enter the SEVIS database. Power: it tastes like chicken.

Last Monday, I was sitting in my office getting some training with my colleague when my phone rang. Since at the time nobody had access to my direct line, I was a little disturbed, yet nonetheless I picked up the receiver and answered.


Me: Office of International Services, this is Domonic.
Woman: Hello, may I speak to Domonic Potorti?
Me: That’s me.
Woman: Hello, my name’s Blankety-Blank, and I represent the Department of Homeland Security.

{the wet sound of trouser-chili being pressed out of my bowels can be heard distinctly}

Woman: We’ve recently received a request for naming you as a Designated School Official. We’re doing the background check and I have some questions for you.
Me: {swallowing tongue} OK.
Woman: I have some information that you have spent a considerable amount of time in a predominantly Muslim country. Is this correct?
Me: Yes, I spent nearly six months in Turkey.
Woman: I see. When was that?
Me: In late 2000, early 2001.
Woman: What was the nature of your stay?
Me: I was studying abroad during my junior year.
Woman: And what was the nature of your study?
Me: I was studying archaeology and art history.
Woman: I see. During your stay in Turkey, did you ever study in an Islamic medrese?
Me. No.
Woman: During your time in Turkey, did you, or did anyone you associated with, participate in movements directed by the PKK, or Kurdistan Worker’s Party?
Me: No.
Woman: Did you, during your stay in Turkey, ever visit the Islamic Republics of Syria or Iraq?
Me: No.
Woman: I see. Well, I am going to dispatch an agent from Homeland Security to you to complete this interview. His name will be Stephen Sechrist.

At this point, my brain folded in upon itself; Stephen Sechrist was one of the OIS’s former Graduate Assistants, known for his immigration acumen and his singular ability to eviscerate with cruel, Satanic practical jokes. Just when I was going to demand to speak to him, another woman’s voice came on the line.

Oh yes. It was Brooke. Former Front Desk Gangsta Numba One, and there she was, making me defecate in my undergarments for her own amusement. I expected this from Steve; from Brooke, never. Had she realized that I would spend the rest of my natural existence trying to find a way to make her pay, perhaps she would have reconsidered. The worst part of it all was that I was genuinely terrified that some government minion really thought that I went to Turkey to learn the subtle arts of beheading and issuing fatwahs; I don’t have any documentation, save my exam results, that I didn’t take the midnight bus to Baghdad every weekend to mull with mullahs.

In the dark of some night, dearest Front Desk Gangsta Soul-Sistah, I shall come to thee and level a pointy finger of reckoning that will shudder you. Or maybe I will just bide my time until you are weakest, like a newborn wildebeest on the Serengeti, and then I will come.

Or, maybe, when I see you next, I will hug the breath out of one of my best friends – one whom I miss daily and whom I wish were here, sweltering in the hearthstone-heat of the Republic, by my side in the office where for two years we were inseparable.

Here’s hoping you have a friend good enough to call you on the first day of your new job, having a coworker pretend that they are an attaché to a monolithic government entity and making you genuinely feel as though you’ve gutted an infidel whilst crying “Allahu akbar.”

I leave you with a portion of a correspondence a visiting scholar had with Brooke. This, if anything, makes those of you who aren’t in this field understand how insanely difficult, and yet intensely amusing, this line of work can be. Maybe that’s why we stay in it, after all: laughing until you are about to puke at some things our internationals say makes it all worth it sometimes.

"I met my husband 11 years ago when I was a teacher at a University Preparation Academy. He always supports me with belief and delicacy. Also, he enjoys travel and reading that made him healthy to run 3 miles a day. My daughter is always bright with full of humor, and sheis honest that she never lied or said a bad word until today. Moreover, she looksfor her own work and finds interes in reading, travel, painting, and languages like English and Chinese. That established her dream to be a simultaneous interpreter. My father has made this peaceful family with loyalty and sincerity. My mother makes participation on every house workwithout skipping, and she is a good cook. My pet dogs, Joy and Dodo, are another part of my family. They greet me graciously on my exit orentering my home, and sometimes they show attitude. Also they snore like big man."

Also! *ahem*

"From an old saying, there is hair in front head of chance, but it is bald in the back. Therefore, you can catch if you grab the front, buteven Zeus cannot catch if you miss. I am determined to study and examinenew things. I will try my best with resolution to endure all pain to pass knowledge and wisdom to my country, which everything lacks."

I remain, as ever,

Dom