Revving up American Identity

You must first understand this: Our house is bugged. Our cell phones are tapped. Men with antennae-studded cars sometimes sit in front of our house. Though opaque, lined curtains cover every window in our house, when the guards need something (an almost hourly occurrence), they somehow know to knock on the window of the room we occupy. Griff’s translator and our housekeeper are usually inside. The second we step outside our front gates, we are zoo animals in a moving cage – people stare incessantly. Usually, if we have to go somewhere, our driver takes us. We live perpetually in a reality television show that will never be aired: someone is always listening or watching or both.

When I don’t feel too mired in an Orwellian dystopia, I buoy myself by imagining an episode of Real World Islamabad. The best part of the show takes place in a dim ISI control room shaped like a narrow rectangle; here work the poor souls assigned to listening to every word we speak and write. A huge dinosaur of a computer with blinking green and red lights and a punch card reader covers the entire length of one long wall. The opposite wall is a one-way mirror; one the other side stand ISI middle managers and, of course, the television crews (how meta is this?!?). Garbage pails overflow with empty Jolt cans and aspirin vials and Mentos wrappers. Ten young men in uniform (two for each source: email, car recordings, house recordings, my cell phone, and Griff’s cell phone) sit in uncomfortable office chairs facing the hot and very loud computer. The eight responsible for audio surveillance wear enormous head phones plugged into the computer. The two others sit by a shoot, through which tumble copious dot matrix print-outs of our emails. At the end of the day, each ISI agent formulates a report of his findings – meaning, of course, that from five primary sources come ten secondary sources that will each require review by at least two more people, who will no doubt need to document their findings. The main sources of drama in this part of the show are the moments when one of the ISI agents falls asleep and one of the middle managers bangs on the glass.

But when this experiment with mental quasi-escapism provides little relief, the time comes for an exercise in denial. And so, at night, when there’s very little traffic, Griff and I wrest the car keys from our (reluctant) driver and brave the left-side drive. Though it is impossible that our car isn’t bugged, it is possible to imagine it is not – maybe because we are moving, because no one else is in the car, because no one is rapping on the windows, because we feel like we are together in a small space with confines that we control. We turn up the music and sing loudly; we make strange noises and faces; we say incredibly obnoxious things; we laugh. It is the only time we ever feel like we are alone together, even though we aren’t, really.

We look forward to these car rides more than our destinations. The twenty-minute drive to the gym, once seen as a liability, is now an incentive to work out. “Forgetting” the map and getting lost on the way to a friends house is a relished experience. Somehow we've become more American than we ever were, ignoring our blackening carbon footprints in favor of that illusion of freedom, that Janice Joplin "nothing left to lose," known as the open road.