WASHINGTON — At 09:41 local time, our observation began outside a field office of the United States Department of Homeland Security, the agency charged with guarding the edges of the species' territory map. On the wall beside the entrance, a screen played a video intended to demonstrate the agency's readiness for border protection. The video featured Brian Dawkins, a retired safety of the National Football League — the governing body of the local gridiron ritual — and an inductee of that ritual's Hall of Fame, the Canton, Ohio repository where the species enshrines its most accomplished ball-carriers. Mr. Dawkins is not employed by the agency. This was not treated as an obstacle.
Eleven employees passed the screen during our first hour of observation. Nine looked. Two adjusted their laminated credentials, which the colony treats as a form of looking. In the video, the athlete ran at full speed and collided with smaller men; the lobby found this reassuring. Beneath the screen, a printed placard read READY. Small talk held at the volume humans reserve for weather.
In late September, the National Football League asked Homeland Security to remove the video. The agency removed it. By our count the operation took under four minutes: one employee, one stepladder, one remote control. The screen went dark, then brightened with footage of a coastline. On the wall beneath the athlete's former post hung a faint rectangle of less-faded paint, the exact dimensions of readiness, now vacant.
"We borrowed him at the highest standard of care," said Chadwick Merrin, the agency's Deputy Undersecretary for Readiness Visuals. "He was returned in the condition we found him. Slightly watched."
Across the street, Doreen Alva, a woman feeding a parking meter with the patience of long practice, watched the stepladder being folded into a closet. "Nobody asked Brian," she said. "Brian probably would have said yes. They did not need to take him, and they took him anyway."
Our running tally since embedding: questions asked of the athlete before his image was borrowed, zero. Apologies issued to the wall, zero. Apologies issued to the athlete, zero. The colony does not count these things. That is why we are here.
