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By Root 102 0

life was, I guess, when I became a citizen. I had to do a lot of studying for it, and I usually have problems in memorizing – like, reading comprehension I have problems with. But I was able to read it, read all the test questions and answers for the test to become a citizen. They test you – a person from the Immigration and Naturalization sits with you and they ask you questions and you have to answer them without looking. So you have to have that in your mind – you have to study before. There were a lot of pages, a lot of pages. I had to do a lot of studying, a lot of things that I studied for they didn’t really ask me about, but I did learn a lot.

Miranda:

How old were you?

Domingo:

That was a long time ago, in high school. But that was one of the happiest times in my life, where I did something that actually came through. I felt really happy about it, I really did.

Miranda:

So tell me about these pictures on the wall.

Domingo:

I have, like, fantasies and stuff, like I pretend I’m an officer, you know, a deputy sheriff, things like that.

Miranda:

When did you start collecting?

Domingo:

I’ve had quite a few years doing this. Actually, I started after I graduated from high school. I was never able to become a police officer or a deputy sheriff or anything like that. And what happened there is that I built a fantasy that I’m a judge, that I’m a police officer, that I’m a deputy sheriff, and then I investigate – I call and see what their working shifts are like. I’m going through some psychological, psychiatric treatment as well, and so I tell this to my therapist. He said, well, if it’s something that doesn’t take you away from doing other things, it’s okay to have fantasies, as long as you don’t go and tell people that you are what you say you are in your mind. And it is all in my mind. And then I put pictures on the wall that I’m a judge, that I have a family, that I have a car, things like that. I have to have them on the wall for it to come true in my head. Because if I don’t put it on the wall –

Miranda:

You can’t see it.

Domingo:

I can’t focus it in my mind. So it’s got to be something that I, um...

Miranda:

You can look at a picture.

Domingo:

I can look at it and I have it there itself. I go to the librarian, my friend, and she’s the one that finds all these pictures for me. She knows what I have them for, so she knows that I never collect anything that’s, um, you know… naked pictures or things like that.

Miranda:

It’s family life.

Domingo:

Yeah, with kids and things like that. You know, I’ve been doing this for years, and I usually change my pictures around when I feel like I need to change, to be somebody different.

Domingo walked us back to our car. We thanked each other many times. It was unclear why we were so thankful – it had to have been for totally different reasons, or maybe just the shared high of communion. I found myself paying him a little bit more than everyone else, as if this would somehow level things out. Because of all the people I had met, Domingo was certainly the poorest. Not the saddest, not the most hopeless, but the person whom I felt most creepily privileged around. We drove home, in my Prius. If I interacted only with people like me, then I’d feel normal again, un-creepy. Which didn’t seem right either. So I decided that it was okay to feel creepy, it was appropriate, because I was a little creepy. But to feel only this way would be a terrible mistake, because there were a million other things to notice.

All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life – where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it. Domingo was compulsive and free-floating, seemingly unashamed, and his insides, his dreams, were taped to the walls. That night Brigitte sent me the day’s photographs; I looked through all of them, in case there were things that I had missed by actually being there. I studied a picture of Domingo’s calendar. “Today is my birthday,” read one square. “I’m 45 years old, an old man.