Last week I spent four hours over two days’ time at the Social Security Administration office on West 126th Street, trying to sort out an application to rejoin Medicare Part B because my former employer, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, won’t let me continue my health benefits—for which I pay a monthly fee—upon retirement unless I’m enrolled. I resigned from Part B in December on the assumption that I shouldn’t be paying for two overlapping sets of benefits, but I am now told, three months into retirement, that I must do so to get both. No, it doesn’t make any sense: it’s not supposed to.
Sitting in that office didn’t bother me until the third hour of waiting for my number to be called. It was a little after 11:00 AM on Friday when I recognized the beginnings of a panic attack: cold sweats, nausea, dizziness (yes, even while seated), shortness of breath, and confusion, to the point where I started laughing but not smiling at these symptoms, as if they weren’t mine.
I looked around the room, trying to find something to concentrate my attention, and realized that I was experiencing the effects the room was designed to cause, and that these effects gathered neatly under the heading of abjection. Like everybody else in this windowless space, I had been subjected to an anonymous authority that made me feel like an inert, speechless object. The feeling is familiar to anyone who has been to an unemployment office or been seated in a court of law as a defendant.
How was it imposed, though, what was it about the room that penetrated my body, or at least bound it, causing physical symptoms as if a germ-like invisible agent—an “aerosol,” as we call it since Covid-19 infiltrated our everyday lives—had filled the breathing space, or had somehow purchased an option on the oxygen around me?
Where to begin? First, the seating. There are 16 rows of benches divided by a central aisle that is blocked at the front of the room by a square pillar that holds four screens on which we can watch ourselves and a board announcing the order of our service, by numbered ticket. The people in wheelchairs can’t get around that pillar without great care informed by long practice and precise navigational skills.
The benches are stamped grey metal, truly uncomfortable of course, and face forward like pews in a church, oriented toward some source of information or authority, which, upon examination, turns out to be not an altar or a pulpit (or a judge) but an array of signs that connote a power which is distant and yet present, waiting for enforcement either by armed and uniformed guards or, more likely, the individual conscience of each of us, we who know without thinking that there are rules of comportment here that must be followed. We don’t what they are, exactly, but we know that our quietude will keep us out of trouble.
That array of signs consists of an American flag, photographs of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the two most powerful people in the world, framed lists of commandments—dos and don’ts while you’re in this office—and an office that is marked with the number 1 above the door. The office is empty: the door never opens, nobody comes and goes, but there it is, waiting for penitents and plaintiffs, like the principal’s office in secondary schools, where you go to plead your pathetic case.
The power vested in these signs is corroborated, validated, by the slow, gimpy motion of the congregation, the audience, the supplicants—however we are denominated here. Nobody moves fast, or gracefully, because they can’t, or because they know that to do so would be an affront to somebody, either the authorities or the other people in this room full of geriatric basket cases, half of them equipped with canes, the other half stooped and wearied by too many years of hard labor.
These sights are illuminated, if that is the right word, by florescent squares lodged in acoustic ceiling tiles, put there in the mid-1950s when the building went up. The room has since been reconfigured twice as far as I can tell, once to install bulletproof glass as protection for the government’s employees, probably in the late-1970s, then again to amplify the distance between “customers” and employees during the pandemic, by creating cubicles that separate each from everyone else during the “consultations” that constitute the site’s actual work.
The sights are compounded and the silence is punctured by three registers of sound. There is the voice of authority, uttered by the uniformed guards who direct traffic at the automated reception kiosk and reprimand those whose masks droop. There is the voice of insecurity or confusion, often a low buzz—no conversations happen here, only furtive exchanges, because everyone is aware that a violation of some protocol becomes probable if they speak in a normal tone—and it is always muffled or interrupted by the voice of authority; it’s never altogether silenced because everyone in the room except the uniformed guards (they are, not incidentally, employees of a private security company) is anxious, unsure of what to expect, just hoping not to be ignored.
And there is the voice of derangement, madness made not merely audible but intelligible, even articulate. At this level of sound, you hear “This is crazy, man, I can’t breathe in here,” or “What’s my number, it’s not on the board!” or “Is this the 4th floor?”—it must be, because the decrepit elevator doesn’t stop at 2 or 3— and such phrases are repeated by the same person, over and over, as he shuffles around looking only at his ticket as if it’s a sextant that he hopes will point him in the right direction. The thing is, you want to say the same things.
And if you’re me, you do. That’s how I calm myself down, by repeating what I know to be true, what I hope will soon pass: “This is crazy, man, I can’t breathe in here.”