Calmly going about their work in the lab, the others seemed the picture of normalcy. So normal that Mohammed felt as though he’d stepped into that movie where he was the crazy one, even though he alone saw that everyone else had been replaced by a double, grown in a pod. “You’re asking me to spy on my colleagues for you?” he had asked the Ag agents near the conclusion of their meeting. “Not spy, just notify us if you see anything suspicious.” At the time, Mohammed would have happily spied for them. He would have done anything to escape the claustrophobic grip of their room. It was only afterwards, after he had time to think of the secrets he had to betray about his coworkers, that he was able to see what sort of pod-person the agents wanted him to become, meeting them in shadowy garages to report that Gabe made her own yogurt, or that Meadow was having troubles with her husband after the death of their child….

Taped to the side of his cabinet was the photo of his wife and child. They had all made a trip home to Bahrain before he was to return to Venezuela to study, and Mohammed had asked a stranger to shoot the picture so he could be in it with his wife, his wife holding their child. It had been during Ramadan, a happy time of year. The palms that filled the water park they had gone to for an evening stroll were filled with dates. But unlike the family photos Americans had on their desks at work, Mohammed and his wife were not touching. Even if morality police didn’t patrol the palm groves, it wouldn’t have occurred to Mohammed or his wife to hold hands in public. They merely stood beside each other, expressionless. A portrait of two peoples: Americans smiled even in the photos for their passports—as though happy to see the government official filing away their faces, their smiles betraying how deeply they assumed that all would be fair, unlike the line of gray men in the passport office back home, stoically waiting for the camera’s click to dispatch them as if they already stood before the immigration/police/interrogator machinery that would use the photo to decide their fate.

Somehow Mohammed had known even then that he would end up as a ‘person of interest.’ His uncles had foretold it when, to their astonishment, his visa was approved and word spread of his coming to America: where everyone had a big car and machine gun.

​

The agents who had summoned him for a ‘conversation’ were investigating the collapse of bee colonies in the Midwest, they said. Some of the bees found in a hive had GFP in their genome. So they’d cross-indexed names of guest workers from ‘countries of interest’ with sales of the machine a terrorist would need to insert GFP into the genome of a bee and he and his lab were a match. “What can you tell us about that?”

I can tell you, he wanted to say, what was obvious: they were chasing shadows. How many more people like him were they using?—people with vulnerable immigration status, people they could scare into helping them with their ‘extreme vetting.’ The devil’s desire colonizes your thoughts so completely that by the end you can’t even think to ask for forgiveness.