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them was pity.
    On occasion I would try to match their faces to the statements I had read. Who among this haphazard and wandering tribe was Afghani or Pakistani, Sudanese or just pretending to be because they knew it made the process easier? If I didn’t know for certain when they entered, I assigned them the narrative that I thought they deserved. A gray-haired and prematurely stooped man who tried to look his best in his donation suit was the Iranian professor whose statement I had read a few days earlier, even if there was no chance that could have been true. His real life had clearly been much harder. The difficult stories, the ones that came with death or prison and rape, I left alone. I never tried to imagine whom they belonged to. It made it that much easier to bring the clients coffee or tea or Coke before they had a chance to ask.
    In time I was given the job of editing out the less credible or unnecessary parts of some of the narratives, while at the same time pointing out places where some stories could be expanded upon or magnified for greater narrative effect. I was seen as the literary type in the office, with my background in literature and my supposed desire to get my Ph.D. Angela, as one of the summer lawyers working at the center before her more profitable private-law career began, would pass stories to me that needed to be “touched” or “built upon.” I took half-page statements of a coarse and often brutal nature and supplied them with the details that made them real for the immigration officer who would someday be reading them. I took “They came at night” and turned it into “We had all gone to sleep for the evening, my wife, mother, and two children. All the fires in the village had already been put out, but there was a bright moon, and it was possible to see even in the darkness the shapes of all the houses. That’s why they attacked that night.”
    It was easy to find the necessary details; they resurfaced all over the world in various countries, for different reasons and at different times. I quickly discovered as well that what could not be researched could just as easily be invented based on common assumptions that most of us shared when it came to the poor in distant, foreign countries. Bill put it to me this way once: “When you think about it, it’s all really the same story. All we’re doing is just changing around the names of the countries. Sometimes the religion, but after that there’s not much difference.” It was his suggestion that I borrow from one story to feed another. “No one will ever know the difference,” he said, and at least in that regard he was wrong.
    After a few weeks of working together, Angela came over to my desk. She was holding one of my reports; it was the first time she had actually gone back and read what happened to one of them after they passed through my hands.
    “What is this?” she asked. She handed me the report—the supposedly true-life account of a family driven from their home in Liberia. It had been one of my more dramatic and to my ears better efforts: the family, as I cast them, forced to take shelter for weeks in a church while outside a militia stood waiting for them.
    “This isn’t even close to what happened,” she said. “They flew business class straight to Dubai. Who are these people?”
    Angela wasn’t angry so much as shocked at what I had done. One of the many things that we had easily assumed about each other was that when it came to the clients, we both saw them strictly for who they were, with no sentimentality attached to them or their plights. What I had done betrayed that belief.
    “I didn’t make them up,” I said, which was true. Something similar had happened to someone else, although whether I had heard it in the office or read it in the newspaper I could no longer remember.
    “This isn’t what I wanted,” she said. “Give me back the original.”
    I handed her back the one-page report that told the