I pulled the glass door toward me and walked into the Cord Camera store. The Man sat across from the entrance, on the other side of a glass display filled with shelves of Minolta and Canon SLR cameras. He read the newspaper and his pasty, distended arms looked like alabaster bookends holding the news captive. 

He looked up at the tinny rattle from the metal bell on the glass door, as if it were the sound of a morning distraction. 

“I need a passport photo...please,” I said, taking a step toward him.

I had a copy of the instructions from the United States Immigration Center folded into a quarter of its size, ready to address any questions. The headshot was for a permanent residency application. A green card. I told myself this was no different from getting headshots in Singapore when I applied to do my masters studies at Ohio University. It was a transaction, an exchange of money for services. No more. No less. 

Piece of cake.

The Man looked me over and then back down at his newspaper, almost as if he was not going to let his morning ritual be interrupted by a fifteen-dollar customer. My consignment store leather jacket started to weigh on me. It felt bigger than when I’d put it on that morning. I looked around to make sure I was at the right place, hoping I had made a mistake.

The store looked the way it smelled, musty, like a pile of beat-up gym shoes. In a corner, I saw a barstool with legs chipped from too many reincarnations. About three weeks’ worth of the Columbus Dispatch were stacked on the stool, leaning against a yellowing Vanguard sheet taped on the surface behind it. A Polaroid box camera on a tripod leaned against the adjacent wall which was monopolized by a Rand McNally world map stippled with red push pins.

This has to be the right place. 

“Are you a member of triple A?’ he asked, looking up from his newspaper after what felt like minutes. We made eye contact for a second, his bluish grays on my dark browns, then he looked back down to the newspaper. I did a mental scan, trying to remember the list of requirements on the immigration instruction sheet, wondering how I missed the part about AAA membership.

“How can they say they’ve elected board members when they didn’t even ask me to vote,” The Man continued before I could answer him, jabbing his pale forefinger into the newspaper article as if trying to poke holes at the establishment. “I wouldn’t have voted anyway. Not that anyone asked me for my opinion,” he scoffed.  

My legs felt tight under me and had not moved since I walked in, but my mind raced.

Not saying a word to me about the headshot, he inched his stool behind the glass counter toward his studio corner, picking up the stack of the Dispatch along the way and dropping it to the floor. 

“So where are you from?” he asked, dragging the tripod and positioning it in front of the Vanguard backdrop.

“Singapore,” I said, my legs tethered to a spot on the store’s musty carpet.

“Hmm...Singapore,” he echoed. The Man surveyed the continents on his map, picked up a red push pin and stuck it on an island one degree north of the Equator. Singapore. The world map was interestingly clear of pins except for a splash of red plastic in the continents of Asia and Africa. I saw two red pins in the middle of the Peninsular of Malaysia, presumably on its capital Kuala Lumpur, and it looked like there was one on the island of Hong Kong.  

Is he mapping me? Why?

He motioned me to sit on the barstool, the carpet releasing me at his command. I walked to the stool and climbed on the vinyl seat, my legs dangling about four inches off the ground.

“Not China, eh?” he grunted, sounding irritated that he had me pegged wrong. He appeared to shift his geographical filters while he centered me on the camera screen. 

 “China...that’s where all those lesbians go to adopt little Chinese babies,” he said nonchalantly, his eyes still locked in on the picture frame in the camera.

What did he just say? Was that a joke?

I sensed the blue gray eyes through the camera viewfinder, looking for the balance between dark and light exposures. Looking for something. A furrow started to form on my forehead. 

Is he waiting for me to say something? To laugh?

“Okay – straight at the camera,” he said, seemingly satisfied with what he saw through the viewfinder. The stool under him creaking in protest of its hefty load as he shifted his position to take my headshot. The Man fiddled with the camera, inserted the photo plate and paused. 

“So,” he said, the camera against his right cheek muffling his voice, “you finally decided to be part of the solution, huh?”

Click. He took his first shot.

I held my breath. My mind, fueled by adrenaline, feverishly scanned the databanks of my foreign experience in search of some kind of cultural cipher, a Cliff Notes reference to understand what he had just said. Part of the solution. My foreignness, usually affording me the opportunity of new adventures from fresh perspectives, was now reduced to an intimidating and disturbing uncertainty. Of not knowing. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand what he said. I just couldn’t make sense of why he said it. 

When did I start to be part of a problem? When I stepped onto American soil, paying Singapore dollars to get a degree? When I walked into the lives of a small-town Ohio community who embraced my newspaper stories with copious thank you notes and praise? Or was it when I started to take up space, brazenly starting a life in someone else’s homeland even though I had my own? 

“Don’t move. I’m going to take another shot,” he ordered, his pace suddenly picking up, as if fueled by a surge of energy.

He took another headshot then motioned me off the stool as he walked over to the glass counter, photo plate in hand. He grabbed an invoice pad out from under the newspaper and scribbled on the top sheet. His oversized fingers were surprisingly deft, finding the corner of the protective film and peeling it off the top of the Polaroid photo.  He tucked the corners of the sheet, with four soon-to-be headshot images, into the slots of what looked like a passport cover. 

“It’ll show up when it dries,” he said, handing me the package. “You can wait here if you want.” 

I took the package from him carefully, not wanting to disturb the live pigments on the Polaroid sheet in the process of forming and defining a face they hadn’t yet recognized. 

Did he just take my picture, or did he already have one in his head? 

I paid him for the transaction: my $14.99 in exchange for images wrapped in his distorted world view. In his question, waved at me like he would the American flag and her brilliant colors. In his pinning me to a point on his map, driving a red post into the ground to make sure I stayed tethered to the longitude and latitude in which I was born. In his wanting me within the boundaries drawn in cartographic scale, not to be let out to wander into worlds where I did not belong.

-Elita Suratman

Elita Suratman came to the United States as a writer with dreams. Then, life happened. A journalism degree, a family and a twenty year marketing career later, she is rediscovering her writing roots. Elita is working on her cross-continent memoir The Space Between, where she explores the intricate interplay of family, culture, and relationships as evolving layers in the fabric of her self-identity. “No Words,” an excerpt from her memoir, won a Best-in-Show award and has been published in a literary magazine Flights. To read this, visit www.elitasuratman.com