Disassociation and Diaspora: On Ken Kalfus' "2 A.M. in Little America"

Ken Kalfus | 2 A.M. in Little America | Milkweed Editions | 2022 | 234 Pages

It’s 2 a.m. in a small enclave of American refugees living abroad. After years of relocating from country to country to find relative safety, the residents are watching a war break out between factions of migrants who rehash political conflicts from back home. 

The protagonist, Ron Patterson, is one such refugee who tries to make a home for himself under such harsh conditions. We meet Patterson as a newly displaced migrant living in an unnamed seaside city far from the small American town where he grew up. The United States’ growing political divisions have come to a head in Patterson’s reality, and America as we know it has dissolved into violence and instability along partisan lines, scattering its citizens around the world.

Throughout his entire adult life, Patterson must navigate unforgiving immigration policies that change with the political winds. He constantly has to move, sometimes without notice, to any country that will accept Americans. Before he was forced to leave his hometown, Patterson was a boy who played baseball, shopped at Target, and attended public school. Now, he lives in exile, trying to make ends meet without getting deported back to a country that has become uninhabitable. Disappearances have become commonplace, people are killed in the middle of the night, and human rights are desecrated in prison camps right in Patterson’s hometown. 

Patterson’s flashbacks to his life in America, as well as vivid descriptions of watching partisan divisions grow over time, give the reader a disturbing sense that this could easily happen in our lifetime. Yet Patterson, like most Americans, never thought he could become a refugee.

At times, he is completely unable to comprehend the world around him as his circumstances change too rapidly to process. “I found it so difficult to accept the conditions of my actual existence,” he says, “that I was no longer sure what was real and what was not, what was possible and what was not possible.”

In the early days of Patterson’s status as a refugee, he comes face-to-face with a woman he thinks he may have known in America. Though the American diaspora do not acknowledge each other abroad to avoid the same political disagreements that caused so much violence back home, Patterson becomes completely fixated on this person—this small connection to his past—and projects her onto every woman he encounters. This obsession further loosens his understanding of what is real and what is not. 

Patterson meets the woman several times throughout this decades-long story. Each time, she has adopted a new identity to avoid danger. She changes her style: her hair, her glasses, her clothes. Sometimes when they meet, Paterson can’t be sure, though he suspects he's talking to the same person. He is so desperate to believe she is the woman from his hometown, if only to prove his previous life wasn’t a dream. He asks her if she is really Amanda Keller, a classmate from high school, and she pretends to not understand English. 

She regularly gaslights Patterson about who she is, even after he correctly guesses. As a reader, it can be difficult to know what can be believed from Paterson’s narration. We are made to share in his loose grip on reality.

Under one of her false personas, while the woman is living as someone named “Marlise,” she and Patterson develop a relationship, or as close to a relationship as either will allow themselves. “We were careful to limit our affections,” he says, “knowing that the unreliability of our residency permissions made courtship too perilous.” 

“Marlise” does ultimately share one true detail of her life with Patterson: she is married with a son. Her family was not able to come abroad with her. The only way she maintains her sanity slightly better than Patterson is by shedding all memories of her previous life and committing to the persona of whoever she needs to become in order to survive. “It would be better if I stopped thinking about him,” she says of her son. “He was a dream. It would be better if I stopped thinking of the place I came from. It’s a dream too, a hallucination, a false memory.” 

Patterson and “Marlise” regularly highlight their lack of agency as unwelcome immigrants in this unnamed country. “Living out of a small suitcase, packing and unpacking as if its contents matter, as if they truly represent who we are… it’s not actual existence.” As the two navigate the danger and instability of their immigration status, they are forced to move separately from country to country, seeking and failing to find any semblance of safety or stability.

After a series of moves, Patterson finds himself living in a city where Americans do acknowledge each other, simply because there are too many living there to ignore. While none of Patterson’s host countries have embraced American migrants as equal citizens, the discrimination that Americans face in this new city, even on a structural level, is unparalleled. “The congestion of the streets, the ramshackleness of the residential structures and improvisational dwellings, their confinses, the noise and refuse, and the limited penetration of daylight were beyond most of the Americans’ experience,” says Patterson. 

Even so, Americans here attempt to recreate their hometowns with makeshift department stores and familiar fast-food chains. These recreations fall short of the real experience, and Patterson realizes several times throughout his stay that American culture is rapidly being erased. 

“The memories of certain common American experiences wouldn’t survive the currently living generation,” he says. He wonders if the children in the neighborhood would consider themselves American, or if the natives of their new country would ever accept them as anything else. The dichotomy between the American migrants and natives of the country is overwhelming, and regularly parallels the real-life dynamic between Americans’ treatment of immigrants from foreign countries with cultures different than our own.

Patterson often faces hostility when his work as a repairman brings him into other parts of the city: “I often sensed, doing my rounds for work, traveling by foot on the streets and aboard public vehicles, that an impenetrable glass wall lay between me and the city and country in which I was living.” He visits buildings all around the region. He thinks he sees “Marlise” throughout these travels, though he, and by extension the reader, can never be sure. The confusion that defined his early days as a refugee returns with the sightings of his long-lost friend, and Patterson becomes more guarded. After years of living abroad, his sense of self-preservation is stronger than ever, and he is more careful with his words and actions. 

When a gang of other residents from the enclave learn about Patterson’s ability to access certain buildings, they take advantage of this to benefit their criminal enterprise. Patterson tries to bring this matter to the police, telling them that there could soon be violence on their streets, but he is dismissed as being a hysterical migrant who makes no sense. “You don’t know shit about this country,” one officer tells him. 

While living under the weight of this criminal coercion, Patterson comes face-to-face with “Marlise” again. She is living under the identity of someone else from Patterson’s hometown, and has reunited with her husband who, it turns out, committed “unspeakable evils” back in America. He is now one of the gangsters forcing Patterson to be an accessory to crime, and one of the driving forces of the unrest growing in their community. Though “Marlise” is the closest thing Patterson has had to a friend for his entire adult life, it is impossible to know whether or not he can trust her. While “Marlise” once offered hope and companionship to Patterson, she now becomes another source of confusion and pain. 

Ultimately, Patterson has to come to the same conclusion that “Marlise” realized decades earlier: to gain any semblance of agency in his life, he will have to become someone else entirely and leave his true identity behind. “I would no longer be a migrant,” he says. “I would no longer be an American.” 

2 A.M. in Little America poses the seemingly impossible question of what anyone might do in such a situation, which is only impossible until it happens. Nobody expects to become a refugee. Through Patterson, we glance some of the emotions and pressures that might come with these conditions. We’re left wondering—with a tangible sense of urgency—whether or not we are ever in control of our own destiny.