Marion flies from Nairobi to Rome to London to New York. The immigration process when he arrives is so minimal he is afraid he missed it. There are no dogs, no soldiers, no long lines, no body searches. No one is rifling through suitcases or cutting the linings to make sure nothing gets missed. Before he is ready, Marion is outside the Customs area and in the middle of a crowd. Instead of the sea of White faces he had expected to see, Marion sees every color and type among the crowd, and their scents are overwhelming to him. He sees a rather swarthy and scruffy man holding a sign that might have said “Marvin” or “Marmen” or ”Martin,” followed by “Stone.” When Marion introduces himself, the man insists Marion is a girl’s name. When Marion tells him about the famous gynecologist he was named for, that there is a statue in his honor in Central Park, that Marion Sims opened the hospital now known as Sloan-Kettering, the man insists gynecologists should be women.

Nevertheless, the man leads Marion to his yellow taxi and soon they are driving out of Kennedy Airport and into the Bronx. Marion is struck by the silence, for in Africa drivers drive with their horns. The cityscape is familiar to him from movies, and he is embarrassed to think of how proud he was that he knew so much about America. Now he understands the hubris is America’s, an arrogance of scale. Everything here is done on a grand scale, including the speedometer in the taxi, which registers seventy miles per hour—a speed unthinkable in the family Volkswagen even if they could find a road on which to try. His life in Africa seems small, as if it did not count, “a gesture in slow motion.” Everything he once considered to be precious is plentiful and cheap here, and what he once saw as “rapid progress” turned out to be “glacially slow.” Marion wants to remember what he is feeling and tries to imprint it on his memory.

At first Marion is hurt by the taxi driver Hamid’s discourtesy. He would have liked to ask him about what he was seeing along the way in an effort to assuage his fear, especially because Hamid also once immigrated to this country. Then he chooses to see Hamid’s silence as instruction, a silent message that he must gather his nerve and find his backbone “or be swallowed whole.” It is an exhilarating insight, and he speaks Ghosh’s constant admonition out loud to himself: “Screw your courage to the sticking place.” When Hamid asks what he is saying, Marion tells him it is a line from Macbeth; Lady Macbeth says it to her husband. Hamid misunderstands and thinks he is being called a woman, and he chooses to take offense as Marion tries to explain. The conversation escalates into a one-sided shouting match until Hamid pulls a gun from the glove compartment.

It is a poor excuse for a gun in Marion’s eyes, but Hamid believes the sight of it will intimidate his passenger. It looks like a toy gun to Marion, who laughs hilariously. Marion has blown a hole in a man’s chest with a gun twice that size; he has buried that gun and its owner in a swamp, and he has performed surgery on soldiers felled by guns. On this day, in the context of an oversized, free, and grand America, the gun seems like a “prop, a cosmic joke.” This is what he faces after fleeing Addis Ababa? As a firstborn, Marion has...