Over the last year, I have found myself descending more than any mortal’s fair share into the dreaded underworld of my local DMV. There have been a number of odds and ends calling me into that chthonic hall—changing my driver’s license to a new state, registration issues, a truly gordian title transfer process—and I have done what I could to make the best of it. The mysteries of the DMV are profound, but in California at least they have done what they can to organize and expedite the process in the hopes (I imagine) of decreasing the number of catastrophic emotional outbursts that must inevitably come from sitting in the same plastic chair for hours on end listening to the saccharine drone of ticket numbers. One can now get in line beforehand electronically, and appointments can be made online. I have yet to try this first feature, as on one of my visits I saw a man turned away because he was unable to run from his truck to the appropriate desk before the next number was called. He argued emphatically with the tired mien of the woman turning him out while an uninterested security guard hovered in the vicinity, only to receive multiple reassurances that “that’s our policy” and walk angrily out of the building with the solemn declaration that “you guys are a bunch of chumps!” It was a devastating rejoinder, to be sure, and I trust the employees felt its string. But alas, the oracle of numbered letters had spoken, and none may contradict its commandments.
This event left me thinking that I ought to make an appointment, lest I too be pushed to the shame of having no better insult than “chump,” and so I have made a habit of navigating the really not so horrific California DMV website and waiting patiently for the appointed date. This gives me the great privilege of entering my own line, a line I notice is conveniently closer to the door than that other, incredibly pedestrian line, which is immediately parallel to my elite line but on the other side of a divider. Both lines lead to the same desk, and despite scheduling and arriving now at three appointments, I cannot tell whether the employee at this desk is instructed to call two individuals from the gentry line for every one from the peasant line or whether one individual is called from each in turn, the expectation being that the aristocratic line will generally be shorter. I suspect there may even be radical, probably anarchist DMV employees who make a habit of calling from the canaille line more than the ancien régime line in order to destroy society, and I am most indignant on this score, though my indolence has prevented my collating names.
The mysteries grow yet deeper once one has received the all-important ticket bearing one’s oracle number and been sent to sit in the vast pool of wailing souls. There is not, I hasten to point out, a distinct seating area for those of us with the intelligence to book an appointment, and this fact seriously detracts from the cachet of the process, a sore disappointment after being given a private line. However, one does receive a uniquely lettered number on one’s oracle ticket—a number completely set apart from whatever numbers happen to be getting called in monotonous rhythm for the gloomy shades who have not been granted an appointment. If B is being proclaimed in succession, B31, B32, F33, B34, one finds one’s own number is a J, and the F that has been called is apparently unconnected with anything whatever and no one can understand why there is an F on the board at all, but it doesn’t matter for the endless list of Bs has nothing to do with the univocity of one’s own J, which is at last called, the only letter of its kind yet announced. One must resist the urge to smirk at having been summoned after only a fifty minute wait while others may have been waiting for a full hour. Nevertheless, a certain disconcertedness weighs over the whole business, for how, after all, do they determine which number will be called next? A clear sequential order is comprehensible, but when there are intersecting sequences and the intervals of overlap remain entirely unknown, it must be asked who—or what—controls the timing of these decrees. Is there a computer algorithm running on a system understood only by the mythical tech-savvy DMV agent? Do the individual workers make the call in silent orison? Is there an overseer, a pile of yarrow stocks, a lottery wheel, a headless chicken? And how do they ensure that my number, my unequivocal number, is called in preference (but not with too much preference) to others? No human seems to guide the lots; it is perhaps the workings of a hidden fate, the voice of the oracle declaring who walks and who sits, who passes to the inner chamber and who is doomed to limbo. We all know the announcing voice of this oracle is that of no present woman, after all, but a mysterious hidden personage unknown, perhaps unknowable, never to be seen but only gestured at in rumor, and in the shadows of rumor.
All the same my number is called, and I am pleased to be at last recognized as a DMV gold member and stand to locate my window, where I must generally strain with all my powers of attention to catch the faint whisps of voice coming from the face behind the plexiglass, a face that rarely makes eye contact, does not respond directly to my questions except after great intervals if at all, and has grown cold from endless rounds of quotidian abuse (chumps, indeed). There is, I should mention, one DMV employee whose voice is not a whisp, but which rather bellows out mundane pleasantries with such booming resonance that everyone in the building can hear it. I have never been called to its owner’s window, but I generally catch some of his jokes while attempting to hear my own particular employee. I bear the man no grudge—I would certainly prefer him to his coworkers, though the latter seem to find him tiresome, as I witnessed one of them gesturing to him with annoyance to wrap it up as one small man continued to stand at the counter declaring how he had “put the fear of God” into somebody with the power of his “attorneys” (I didn’t catch the specifics, straining as I was to hear over, or rather under, this conversation).
Once at the counter, one would think the process could be relatively fluid. This has been the case on a few lucky occasions, but I have found any such hopes are better left unharbored, as they are all too likely to be dashed in great storms of silence that leave one with a growing tide of anxiety bordering on panic. On my most recent visit, the already-mentioned gordian title transfer resulted in the long absence of my DMV priestess while she spoke to her manager. I could feel the eyes of those still waiting piercing my back in anger at my audacity in having a difficult case. On the return of my Pythia, things were little improved, as she looked slowly over my documents while muttering the offerings I still lacked and fiddling with her computer. About this time I was distracted by two elderly gentleman to my right explaining that one of them was going to have the second half of his foot amputated—I missed the relevance of this to his visit, but I can confirm that he did only have half of his right foot, as he pulled it out of his shoe and began twisting the sock around to display its emptiness while his companion kindly told the DMV officer helping them, “look, he’s showing you.” Eventually, I was given a temporary registration and some slight condolences from my priestess over what even her manager called “a hassle.” Indeed, but at least my feet are intact, I tried to console myself.
I have to date still not succeeded in transferring that nasty title, and I look forward to again seeing my friends at the DMV. I expect nothing to change, as my recent pilgrimages there have been absolutely typical of all my previous experiences there and indeed of all those horrid little trips one must sometimes make to governmental departments; whether visiting the DMV, Social Security, County Records, the IRS, or what have you, one always encounters a liminal zone of long, fluorescent lighting, minimal windows, numbered lines, and grey, haggard faces unlikely to break the mold of cold professionalism.
The creed of these offices is the form, ID verification, serialized tickets. Nothing truly abhorrent seems to happen in such places, and yet they are consecrated to a kind of spider, a vast system of bureaucratic machinery that apparently no human power can sway. It is all presented as quite banal, and one would of course be horrified to enter and find employees massaging human blood onto a snake fetish—but not because this would be out of keeping with the other activities of the place as that such ritual would be too aesthetically rich to find purchase there. For the human seems to die in the hands of such bureaucracy, and one frequently searches in vain for small lights of real feeling or humor in those grey halls. And yet they are present, as they must be, and it is from precisely such lights—whether a booming joke, a whispered threat, or a missing foot—that one must draw nourishment if one wishes to avoid giving all one’s blood to that vast idolatrous machine.