Atrocity stories get inflated, as applicants compete with the lore of other applicants. Illustration by BARRY BLITT

I met Caroline one Friday evening in the cafeteria of the upscale Manhattan supermarket where she had just started working. She was a twenty-something African immigrant without papers; we’d recently been introduced by a mutual acquaintance. “Hi, Carol—” I stopped myself, seeing the look on her face.

Caroline was living three lives: as Cecile Diop, a woman with papers who had been in the country for ten years; as Caroline the African rape and torture victim; and as herself, a middle-class young woman who wanted to go to college and make a life in America. It was a continuous exercise in willed schizophrenia. (Names and other identifying details have been changed throughout.)

I tried again: “Hi, Cecile!”

Cecile Diop, a fellow-expat from central Africa, had lent Caroline her Social Security number so that she could get the job. Caroline had showed the store manager Cecile’s I.D., but he couldn’t tell the difference between the two women. She was expecting her first paycheck, which she would give to Cecile to cash. “Some of them take half,” Caroline said, about such arrangements between immigrants.

“I cannot get fired,” she explained. “The owner of the name will have trouble.”

Caroline had big eyes, an easy smile, and short hair dyed red-blond. She was dressed in a denim jacket and jeans and a tight sweater. She walked me around the two floors of the giant supermarket, pointing out all the places where samples were given out. She urged me to take some dried fruit. I pierced a dried-banana slice with a toothpick; it was nearly inedible. Caroline didn’t believe in all this organic and natural stuff. “People in the United States are a little . . .” She pointed a finger at her head and turned it in circles.

At the supermarket, she made ten dollars an hour. After Social Security and medical deductions—which were of no value to Caroline, only to Cecile—she didn’t have enough money to eat at the store, even with the twenty-per-cent employee discount. “I can never eat the hot food,” she said. It cost $7.99 a pound. So, surrounded by food of every description from every country, Caroline brought lunch from home.

As we left the store, Caroline, as an employee, had to submit her bag to a guard for an inspection. “Do you want me to take things out?” she asked. “I can see the bottom,” the guard responded, and waved her on. Another guard, a white woman, trying to soften the humiliation of the inspection, made small talk: “I’ve been looking all over for that kind of handbag for my daughter. Where did you get it? Herald Square?”

Caroline had come to the United States the previous summer for a family wedding. When her parents left, she stayed, even after her tourist visa expired.

Now she was working on a story—a four-page document, in French, that she would give to a lawyer she had hired, and to immigration officials—saying that she was beaten and raped more than once by government soldiers in her country. “I have never been raped,” she admitted, giggling with embarrassment.

A clerk in Caroline’s lawyer’s office had suggested, “Why don’t you say you were circumcised?” Caroline told her that female circumcision wasn’t practiced in her country. So she had learned how to play a rape victim. She had pangs about lying: “Telling that story makes me sad, because I know it’s true for someone.”

A friend of mine, a former lawyer who has represented people in asylum cases, had recently told me about the difficulty of making a persuasive asylum plea these days. “The immigration people know the stories. There’s one for each country. There’s the Colombian rape story—they all say they were raped by the FARC. There’s the Rwandan rape story, the Tibetan refugee story. The details for each are the same.”

It is not enough for asylum applicants to say that they were threatened, or even beaten. They have to furnish horror stories. It’s not enough to say that they were raped. The officials require details. Inevitably, these atrocity stories are inflated, as new applicants for asylum get more inventive about what was done to them, competing with the lore that has already been established, with applicants whose stories, both real and fake, are so much more dramatic, whose plight is so much more perilous, than theirs.

We went to a Brazilian restaurant nearby for a drink and supper. Caroline ordered a coconut cocktail and a salad with chicken.

“I got my paycheck. Want to see it?” She pulled it out of her bag. She’d worked 64.42 hours in the past couple of weeks, at ten dollars an hour. After deductions, she was left with a total of $521.69 to give to “the owner of the name.” She was hoping that the real Cecile wouldn’t take too big a cut; maybe she wouldn’t take any cut at all, even though she was only an acquaintance.

I asked Caroline how, with a thousand dollars a month, she was going to pay the rent, four hundred and fifty dollars a month, for her one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx; cover food and transportation; and pay her lawyer, who was charging three thousand dollars. It turned out that Caroline’s family had to put money in a credit-card account she has back in Africa. And she had been through worse times. For a week, when she was living in a friend’s apartment, she had no money for food. She found some rice in the kitchen, and ate it with the only available condiment—sugar. When December came, she had no winter clothes—only a thin jacket. “We don’t have winter,” she said of the climate in central Africa. One of the teachers at the New York Public Library, where she went for English classes, saw her shivering, and gave her one of her old coats. “It’s funny,” Caroline said, and laughed, thinking about those times.

Caroline’s parents are supporters of a controversial opposition leader. Government soldiers ransacked their house in the city twice. Caroline remembered the soldiers as being very stupid, and from the countryside. Although they didn’t rape her or her sisters, once they broke a dish over one sister’s head, and they beat her brother. They were looking for her father. One of her sisters, as she was running from the soldiers, felt a sharp stab in her foot; she had stepped on a nail. She kept running, with the nail stuck in her foot.

One night, Caroline was walking home on a deserted street when a group of five soldiers commanded her to stop. They searched her bag, and found some condoms. “You carry condoms?” they asked. They emptied the contents on the ground, and stole everything she had—her phone, her watch, her earrings, her money. But they let her go.

She had reason to be fearful. Since 1998, millions have died and millions more have been displaced as a consequence of a tangle of regional wars that have roiled central Africa. And in many regions rape has become common. Caroline spoke about why there is so much violence there: “The ministers who are arresting people today—yesterday, you were arresting them.” Now Caroline wants to live in America, where it’s easier to make money, and easier to live as a woman. She recently had won a prize in a drawing at the supermarket: the right to make up her own schedule for the following week. “I can work more hours!” she told me excitedly.