The guy doesn’t say anything.
“Next time, show up to court, okay?”
“Yeah.”
—
It’s probably before nine in the morning, but the air outside is already muggy as we shuffle across the car park. The whole place is surrounded by barbed-wire fences. It looks like we’re in a pretty desolate area, at the end of a dead-end street in a half-rural, half-industrial part of town.
The van is exactly like the one from last night, except this time Bobbi and I get put into the front section together, she strapped against one wall, me against the other. Rookie steps out and slides the door shut. A minute later there’s the whiny clicking sound of the engine turning over, but the van doesn’t start up. It goes quiet for a second, and then there’s the same clicking sound, followed by silence. I look through the little window and see Olympics in the driver’s seat, turning the key. He tries a few more times and gives up. He and Rookie get out of the van.
We sit and wait. It gets stuffy really fast.
“Is hot,” Bobbi says.
“I know.”
“Hey, Galvarez, you got cables in your car?” Olympics calls to someone I can’t see. “No way am I calling Triple A. Get your ass over here.”
An officer pulls up in an SUV. He and Olympics attach jump leads between his car and the van. The SUV guy doesn’t want anyone else touching his engine, but he also doesn’t seem to know how to jump-start a car. “It’s red to your positive and my negative,” he says.
“I don’t know about that,” says Olympics.
“It goes on both positives,” Rookie says. “It’s definitely red to both positives.”
“Is too hot,” Bobbi says.
She’s starting to ask about the airport again when I wriggle my hands and realize something amazing. “Guess what?” I say. “I can get out of my handcuffs.” She watches as I wriggle my right hand and squeeze it through. I do the same with the left one. It’s really tight but it comes out. “Oh my God,” I say. “This is crazy.”
I look around the van, wondering what I can do with my hands. I could untie the leather belt but then my ankles would still be shackled, and, anyway, there’s no door handle on the inside of the van and, anyway, I wouldn’t try to escape. I’m not about to tap on the window or draw attention to the fact that my hands are free. So I just sit around and play with my hair for a bit. I chew on a fingernail, but it tastes like hand sanitizer. I’m trying to show Bobbi a shadow puppet of a reindeer on the door when the door slides open and Olympics sticks his head in.
“This won’t take—”
I put my hands in my lap.
“What are you doing?” He pushes the door all the way open. “Are your hands free?”
“Yes.”
“How did that happen?”
“I can get them out of my cuffs.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Sorry, I’ll put them back in now.”
“No, don’t,” he says. “Wait here.” He goes and gets Rookie, and brings him over. “With the smaller ladies, you have to cuff them like this,” he tells him, grabbing both my hands in one of his. “One wrist on top of the other, one cuff around both.”
Once they get the engine going, the air-conditioning comes on. As we leave the car park and get out on the road, I peer through the front window and try to make out the street names through the windscreen. I see one called Prison Farm Road, another called Visitation Street. I decide that even if I am allowed back into the States one day, I will never come back to Philadelphia. I probably won’t even eat the cream cheese. I won’t watch the Tom Hanks movie, or the Katharine Hepburn one, and I won’t listen to the Fresh Prince theme song, even though I love it. And I will never, ever call this place Philly. That’s too cute a name for a place like this.
—
Because it’s the first day of the new system, the officers don’t know where to go. When we get to the airport, they drive around, stopping at different side entrances. Olympics makes some calls on his phone. Eventually they get to the right place, and Rookie comes in to unstrap us and let us out. I step down onto the pavement and see Miller, Skolski, and Gallagher standing there.
“Looks like someone made it through the night,” Skolski says.
“Sorry about the delay,” Olympics tells them. “We got a map but it’s not too clear.”
Bobbi climbs out of the van and stands beside me.
“So you’re transporting both ways now?” Miller asks.
“Yes, sir. Here’s my card,” says Olympics, passing one over.
“I didn’t hear about this.”
“Yes, sir,” says Olympics. “We’ll be doing your transportation services from now on, so you can just go ahead and call that number when you require us.”
Miller looks at the card, then hands it back to Olympics. “Okay,” he says, “let’s get them inside.”
“Why is she cuffed like that?” Gallagher asks as Rookie unlocks my hands.
“She slipped out of her cuffs earlier,” Olympics tells him.
“Are you serious?” asks Skolski.
“I put the two of them in back of the van. Next thing I know, she’s waving her hands around like a little Houdini.”
“Unbelievable.” Miller and Skolski start to laugh. When I look up at Gallagher, though, he’s not smiling at all; his jaw is clenched and he’s glaring at me like I just ruined his day before it started.
“I assume you’ll be recording this as a UO?” he asks.
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Olympics says. “Really, no harm was done so—”
“I’ll make a note of it on our end,” Gallagher tells him.
—
Finally, Bobbi has her answer: The Homeland Security officers lead us through the airport unshackled—down a series of corridors and into the elevator, where she and I stand together, listening to the officers talk.
“I never heard about this,” Miller says.
“Morris briefed us last week,” says Skolski. “It costs less if they do it.”
“You think he’s getting kickback?” Gallagher asks. “Seemed pretty damn eager for the work.”
“You been over there?” Skolski asks. “I’d want a reason to get out, too.”
“Skolski,” Bobbi says. “I knowing this name.” The officers look over at her. She points at Skolski’s name tag. “Is Polish name. Are many Skolskis Poland.”
“Oh, yeah?” Skolski says. The other officers don’t say anything. They purse their lips and stare at the door till we reach the right floor and it opens.
—
It’s quiet in the Secondary Questioning Room this morning. Flights haven’t started arriving, and most of the officers aren’t here yet. Gallagher tells us to go sit against the far wall, on the other side of the long table. He hands us each a Styrofoam cup. “You can get water from the bathroom,” he says, “but hang on to those cups. You’re not getting another one.”
There are three chairs against the wall and for some reason, Bobbi sits in the middle one, directly beside mine.
“The flight to Istanbul leaves at eight ten tonight,” Gallagher says. “The Warsaw flight’s at nine thirty.”
“So do we just sit here all day until our flights board?” I ask.
“Yep. Unless you don’t like those seats, and then you can sit in a cell out back.”
“…Okay.”
“Would you prefer to sit in a locked cell?”
“No, I’d prefer to sit here.”
“All right, then.” He goes and sits behind the counter and shakes his head at his computer.
Ellis comes in for a minute and then leaves to get coffee. “You ever thought how much cash you’d save if you made your own coffee?” Gallagher asks.
Ellis shrugs. “Just a matter of time before they start giving me freebies.”
“Oh my God, coffee,” I whisper to Bobbi.
“We can take?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
“
Did you eat?” Gallagher asks us. “Are you hungry?”
“We didn’t eat,” I say.
He opens a cupboard behind the counter. “Do you want Tuscan Vegetable or Chicken Parmesan?”
I look at Bobbi. “Um. The vegetable one, please?”
He comes over with a white electric kettle and two foil packets of food. He tears the bags open and pours hot water into the chicken one. It’s some kind of astronaut food, where you add water and it makes a meal. He hands the bag to Bobbi with a plastic spoon. She starts eating it straight away. He’s pouring water into the other packet when I see that the label reads Tuscan vegetables with beef pieces.
“Oh, I’m really sorry, I don’t mean to be difficult, but I can’t eat that. I didn’t realize it has meat in it.”
He stops pouring. “Are you kidding me? You’re telling me this now?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t see the label before. I’m vegetarian.”
“Seriously? Grow up.” He looks down into the bag. “What am I supposed to do with this now? Give it to a homeless person outside?”
“I mean, I can try and pick out the non-meat parts?”
“Don’t play games with me.”
“Do you have anything in the cupboard that doesn’t have meat in it?”
“No.” He takes the bag and kettle and walks away.
“Would it be possible to go to a vending machine,” I call after him, “and get something from there?”
“No,” he says. “This isn’t the Four Seasons.”
“Why you no eating?” Bobbi asks me. “Is okay. Not bad.”
When I look over at Gallagher again, he’s sitting at his computer, eating the Tuscan vegetables with beef pieces. “I’m making it,” he says when Miller comes in, “I’m halfway through making it, and she tells me she’s not gonna eat it. She tells me she’s a vegetarian.”
“Uh-huh,” Miller says. “What did you expect?”
—
Gallagher has been researching his family on Ancestry.com. Coots has the day off today. Skolski wants to get tickets to a festival that Jay-Z is putting together in a couple of months. Skolski doesn’t really care for Jay-Z’s music, but Pearl Jam is playing and he wants to see them. Skolski loves Pearl Jam. The Albanian is happy with the result of the fight last night. Ellis watched the highlights on TV and he’s glad he didn’t put money on it. Gallagher thinks Ellis would have more money to bet with if he stopped paying through the nose for coffee at the place downstairs, waiting for a free drink they’ll never give him. Miller’s pretty sure you can never expect a single thing for free in this life. He learned this lesson from his, thank God, ex-wife.
The first flights of the day start landing. A couple of travelers come in, looking groggy and confused. An old man traveling alone from Ghana doesn’t know if anyone’s meeting him, and he doesn’t speak English, except for the word “priest,” which he says quietly with a smile, his index finger prodding his own chest.
“They bring priests over to give sermons for big church events. It’s probably something like that,” Skolski says.
“Do they pay them for that?” Ellis asks. “They give you money?”
“Priest,” the priest says.
“It might just be food and board.”
The priest has a list of local phone numbers. Ellis calls a few of them before someone picks up and explains the situation to his satisfaction. He stamps the guy’s passport and hands it back to him.
“Thank you, Father. Enjoy your visit.”
“Priest,” the priest says, smiling. He stands where he is until Morris comes to escort him out to baggage claim.
“Later, Father.” Ellis waves at him and turns to his computer.
—
“Anyone got any pretzels?” Gallagher asks. “Hey, Kristy. Got any pretzels?”
“Go to the vending machine,” Morris tells him.
“Kristy,” I whisper to Bobbi. “Her name’s Kristy.” I feel like I just received a valuable piece of information, but there’s nothing I can actually do with it.
Bobbi asks me what time it is, and I guess that it’s elevenish. She asks how long till our flights and I say I think about nine hours. She asks if we’re going to sit here all day, and I say yes.
“Did you see the lookout?” Ellis asks. He turns his computer monitor toward the other officers.
“This guy,” Skolski says. “Look at this guy.”
“Morris,” Ellis says. “You seen this?”
“The one-day?” Morris walks over to them. “Yeah, it just came in.”
“You think he really looks like this?” Ellis asks. “He won’t get in anywhere in the Northeast looking like this.”
“This fucking guy,” Skolski says.
—
The Albanian is at the long table in front of us, searching through the suitcase of a middle-aged Bangladeshi woman in an orange sari. On the other side of the table, Morris is showing a Chilean couple where to sign a form, while their baby sleeps in a pram beside them. At the counter, Gallagher is questioning a South African girl with a fiancée visa.
“Who paid for your ticket?” The Albanian asks the Bangladeshi woman.
“Okay, that’s it for now,” Morris tells the couple.
“I don’t believe that you paid for that ticket,” The Albanian says.
“Don’t take an attitude with me,” Gallagher says.
“Your actual green card will arrive at this address in three to six months,” Morris says.
“What’s this?” The Albanian asks.
“A calendar,” the woman says.
“I know it’s a calendar. But what are these numbers? What does this writing mean?”
“If I showed up to the airport in South Africa and had that attitude, do you know what would happen? They wouldn’t let me in.”
“Thank you, thank you.” The Chilean couple take their papers and wheel their baby and luggage out, smiling.
“I would get in a lot of trouble,” Gallagher says, “so I advise you to treat me and our country with the same kind of respect I would have to have if I showed up in yours.”
“How do I know it’s your niece’s wedding?” The Albanian says. “How do I know you’re not on the way to your own wedding?”
—
The workday revolves around the arrival of flights, and the few passengers who get sent back here from each one. In their downtime, the officers leave in pairs to get something to eat, or they sit around and talk about the people they’ve been dealing with.
“I say, ‘San Jose, California, or San José, Costa Rica?’ He doesn’t know which one he’s trying to get to,” says Miller.
“She had one of those old green cards,” Ellis says. “The really, really old ones. Like, the ones that were actually green.”
Customs officers come in to use the bathroom or file some papers. “Did you see the lookout?” they ask each other. “That guy’s not getting in anywhere today.”
The travelers become an indistinguishable loop of worried faces, overtired children, and couples who seem sick to death of each other. Occasionally the pattern is broken by the appearance of someone stylish and put-together. Two Austrian tennis players. A catalog model from Thailand. An Iranian woman who left her passport on the plane. The attractive women don’t get special treatment from the officers, but their appearance back here is so rare—a fresh vision among all these other bodies, slumped in chairs, in their sneakers and travel fleece and zip-off cargo pants—that I feel it, too: the charge of sex in an otherwise indifferent environment.
“Do not come back here,” Miller snaps at the Austrian girls when they step forward to look at his computer. He’s angry because one of them said they’re not being paid to be here and the other one said they’re getting two thousand dollars. He gets on the phone with the person sponsoring them. “They can’t come in on B-2s if it’s pay for play,” he says. He pauses to listen. “Yes, there certainly are more important issues in the world I could be dealing with, but I�
��m not dealing with those issues right now, am I? I’m dealing with you and your amateur tennis players.”
—
“What time do you think it is?” I ask Bobbi. She has no idea. “I’m guessing around two,” I say. I’m starting to feel light-headed.
“What I wanting,” Bobbi says, “is cake! Coffee and piece of cake.”
“When I get on that airplane,” I tell her, “I’m going to be so decadent. I’m gonna get a glass of champagne. And I’m gonna pay for Wi-Fi.”
Ellis walks past us, whistling. He opens a filing cabinet and drops a file folder in. “Did you get something to eat or drink?” he asks us.
“They’re fine,” Gallagher tells him.
—
Morris is searching through the suitcase of a PhD student from Belgium. All his clothes are clean and neatly folded; he has a Tupperware container filled with blocks of Belgian chocolate to give as gifts to his American friends, and a thousand dollars in an envelope that his parents gave him as a going-away present.
Morris asks him if he has any tattoos and he pulls up the sleeve of his T-shirt to show her some text on his left shoulder.
“What does it say?”
“It’s a quote from Rilke.”
“What does it say? Translate it for me.”
“Uh, it translates to something like, ‘Let life happen to you. Believe me. Life is always in the right.’ ”
“Very wise,” Morris says.
“Thanks.”
“I wasn’t complimenting you. You didn’t write it, did you?”
“Is this you?” Skolski calls over from his computer. “Disruption and Attenuation of the American Dream in Mexican American Literature, 1964 to 1971?”
“Yes,” the guy says.
“Sounds like a real page-turner,” Skolski says. “I’ll have to read this later.”
“Maybe I’ll go to Belgium and write about the Belgian dream,” Miller says. “How would that feel?”
“I don’t know,” the guy says. “We don’t really have a Belgian dream.”
When he’s allowed to leave, the guy smiles at me and Bobbi on his way out. I make a plan to look him up online when I get out of here, but ten minutes later I’ve lapsed into some sort of exhausted, hunger-induced daze and I’ve forgotten his name, the university he’s studying at, the topic of his thesis, or any other Googlable details.
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