My grandfather turned in to the driveway of one of these houses, which I couldn’t distinguish from any of the others. It had a beige exterior like the rest and a sloping brown roof, pale and discolored from the blinding sun. As I took in air, I smelled the distant odor of manure, as Lolo Bert explained there were cattle ranches on the outskirts of town.

Tito Romeo welcomed us into the house, where we found an aged man in the living room watching a talk show on TV, his socked feet flat against the carpet, also beige. I followed Tito Romeo’s lead and ignored the old man while my uncle led us to our room, past two other rooms that were half-open, where I spied beds and tall contraptions, which my uncle explained were monitors for the patients at the home. As I lay in bed that night, unable to sleep, I took stock of what I’d left behind. I came from a place with varied shapes, patterns, and colors wherever I looked, a culture and history I knew. But this place seemed devoid of distinctiveness; everything looked so similar, a variation of the same mold, be it the roads or houses, even the cloudless sky. How was I supposed to find my way if everything around me looked exactly the same? I tried to quiet these fears, and didn’t notice I’d fallen asleep, until the beeps of inhuman machines jostled me awake.

PART TWO

HARVARD MAN

1993–1997

7.

Harvard Square,” I replied, as casually as I could, when the taxi driver at Logan Airport asked where I was going. I used my bags as an excuse to splurge on a cab, but what I really wanted was to meet my future above ground, feel the curving road that followed the bank of the Charles, the chill of early autumn when I opened the car window.

“Where do you come from?” the driver asked, as I noticed the dark skin on his nape from the back seat, the close-shaved hair below his newsboy cap. He spoke in an accent I couldn’t exactly place, though I could tell it was from somewhere France had colonized.

“California,” I replied, rounding out the vowel in “Cal” to imply that I’d lived there all along and didn’t come from a place where vowel sounds were simple and abrupt.

“Ah, Beverly Hills?” he asked.

“Santa Monica.” A friend took me to that city once, and when we got to the wooden pier that embraced the water, it made me wish I could live there.

“I’m from Haiti.”

“Vous parlez français?”

“Ah oui. Comment vous pouvez parler ma langue?”

“J’étudie le français à l’école.”

“Votre accent est excellent.”