360 Degrees Longitude

by John Higham

  Calling out for my kids garnered nasty looks from people I would never see again. It was only after deciding to return to the pier and spend the night on a bench that I noticed a sign with my name on it, taped to a light pole. It was in September’s handwriting and read, JOHN: GO THIS WAY with a big arrow pointing the direction I should go. At the next corner was another sign, and then another and another until I finally reached our apartment’s front door. Bless her pointy little head. If I wasn’t already married to her, I would propose all over again.

  • • •

  The following morning was the Sunday before Christmas. One of the things we had been enjoying on our travels was attending church whenever we could. Not only did it help us not to confuse our Thou Shalts with our Thou Shalt Nots, it was a great way to meet local people not affiliated with the tourist industry.

  We found a 1:30 p.m. English-language service in the Wan Chai district of Hong Kong Island near the home of Paul and Derek, who were returning that day. We would bake cookies for Santa, and they would eat them. We all thought it a fair trade for a few nights’ accommodation. As we boarded a ferry to make our move to Hong Kong Island, I told September and the kids about my adventure the previous night.

  “After all that, and you still don’t have your cable?” Katrina asked.

  “Nope.”

  With glee in his voice, Jordan asked, “Will you miss your brain, Dad?”

  I didn’t want to talk about it. That’s when I changed subjects and told them that for a while I had thought the WTO riots were going to keep me from returning at all.

  “Those people are so STOO-pid!” Katrina exclaimed, talking of the rioters.

  Jordan, however, was quite intrigued. As we had learned at the Blue Mosque when he made his naughty tally of nonscarf-wearing women, Jordan was fascinated with the concept of civil disobedience. The thought that someone could be so naughty made his whole body pulsate with excitement.

  “What do the police do to the rioters, Dad?” Jordan asked.

  “Well, sometimes they arrest them and haul them off to jail.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Hundreds, I think.”

  Jordan started pacing up and down the ferry aisles with excitement. “How can the police arrest hundreds of people? I mean, that’s too many people, and the police can’t fit them all in one car to take them to jail.” Jordan was talking a mile a minute, and his little body shivered with glee. This was an entire world of defiance of which he’d previously been unaware; it made tallying women without head scarves at the Blue Mosque mere child’s play.

  “In cases like this,” I explained, “police might subdue the rioters with tear gas or water cannons and then cart them away in buses designed to hold dozens of prisoners at a time.”

  Tear gas and water cannons were something Jordan could identify with, as poison gas was an essential element in most Batman movies and practically every video game he had ever played. Jordan sat down and retreated into his private world, ballistic sound effects occasionally escaping his mouth.

  We got off the ferry and went a couple of subway stops to the Wan Chai district, where we dropped off our suitcases at Paul and Derek’s house, then started out on foot toward the church building. Being the Sunday before Christmas, it would probably be our only chance to sing Christmas songs in a congregation, something that is a family tradition dating back at least one year.

  Still several blocks away from the building, we started to see some ominous signs of civil unrest. As we drew closer, it was clear the WTO riots were located exactly where we were headed.

  Parked along the side of the road were a series of bomb-removal vans and SWAT vans. The ordinarily bustling pedestrian traffic had given way to legions of bleary-eyed police in bulletproof vests. When we got within sight of the church building, there were hundreds of police in riot gear surrounding a few dozen protesters. The WTO meetings were in progress right across the street from the church building. Blocking access to the church were layers upon layers of riot police in full-body riot gear with tall plastic shields, standing shoulder-to-shoulder.

  “Church must be cancelled,” I said. “There’s no way to even cross the street without cutting through rioters and police.”

  “There’s a pedestrian overpass,” September pointed out. “We can use that to cross.”

  “Perhaps this isn’t a good idea,” I protested, nevertheless following her up the steps. We wove through clumps of journalists and the delegation from Uganda, who were on their way down. They gave us a wary eye. I knew what they were thinking: “Aren’t the police supposed to keep the riffraff away?” I gave them a cheery smile and a wave.

  When we got to the overpass above the street, we encountered a line of plastic tape emblazoned with big bold letters blocking the path: POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS.

  “Okay, we tried,” I said. “Forget about church. Let’s get out of here.”

  September was not deterred. “This is too cool!” she exclaimed. “How often do you get to go to a riot before church? Stand up straight,” she said quietly to the kids, “look confident and just act like you know what you’re doing.” She lifted up the police tape, dragged the kids under it, and started marching them across the overpass.

  I couldn’t believe it. Well, actually I could. September’s mother had spent a day in jail a few years earlier for crossing a police line when she tried to drive down her own street, which had been blocked for a parade. I hadn’t known that a defective gene could cause one to disregard a police line. “You can’t do this!” I protested, trailing along. “You want to get pepper sprayed?”

  “I’d like us to sing Christmas hymns as a family in a congregation,” September began to pontificate as she led our children over the overpass. “It’s the only connection we have with home during the holiday season. History was built on small acts of civil disobedience—the Summer of Love, Rosa Parks, and so on. It’s a worthy cause.”

  “But there’s no church today. Do you see anyone else crossing the police line?”

  September was not showing any signs of turning around. I figured I couldn’t let the three of them go alone, so I followed. As we descended the steps on the other side of the street, we saw dozens of protesters being herded onto police buses, each with an armed escort. I found myself wishing I had brought my camera, but who brings a camera to church?

  As we approached the church building, several police in riot gear were sitting near the front door. The entryway was littered with food boxes and bottles. Clearly, the police had been using the area all night long as a place to eat and rest, but by the looks of them, they hadn’t been getting much of the latter.

  September approached the door confidently and smiled at the police, who were sitting by the entrance as she tried to open it. Several pairs of bloodshot eyes were giving us quizzical looks.

  The door was locked, but from inside came a nervous, heavily accented voice. “Who is there? What do you want?”

  “We’re here for the 1:30 service,” I replied.

  There was a long pause. I could only imagine what the man was thinking: “These people are clearly not the sharpest tools in the shed.” Finally the voice said, “There is no church today. Please go away.”

  I’ve never been told to “go away” at church before, but decided to take his advice without offense. We turned and hadn’t taken two steps before an official-looking woman approached us, saying, “You are not supposed to be here. How did you get here? What are you doing?”

  September smiled. “We were just trying to go to church. Merry Christmas!”

  We strolled away and wound back through the scores of bomb-retrieval vans, SWAT vans, police motorcycles, and prisoner transport buses. Jordan paused to pick up something from the ground. His eyes grew wide and he exclaimed, “Look what I found!” as he handed me a tattered brochure.

  “Jordan’s radar has gone off,” I said to September, looking over the brochure. “It looks like there’s a Disneyland
right here in Hong Kong, and it’s only a few subway stops from Paul and Derek’s house. Did you know that?”

  “That’s news to me!”

  And with a hopeful look in his eye, Jordan said, “You just never know what’s going to happen on the World-the-Round Trip.”

  • • •

  “You just never know what’s going to happen on the World-the-Round Trip,” September repeated the next day to a feverish Jordan. “We’d like to take you to Disneyland, but if you still have a fever in the morning, we can’t go.”

  Missing Disneyland was the least of our concerns at the moment. We had just passed, albeit accidentally, right through Bird Flu Central a few days earlier. We had just put down our tent stakes, so to speak, in the home of our friends Paul and Derek, who we were now potentially exposing to a nasty virus. We were also to fly to our rendezvous with September’s mom in Bangkok on Christmas Eve.

  “I remember when we were in England,” Katrina offered, “that Jordan got a fever and we just gave him Tylenol.”

  “You can’t pass him through a goat,” Derek said. “With the bird flu scare there are checkpoints everywhere. The stakes are too high.”

  “Pass him through a what!?” we asked simultaneously.

  Paul chuckled. “It’s a saying around here. A goat will eat anything. You can feed a goat a bunch of fake coins, for example, and when they come out the other side, they look aged—quite authentic looking. But the saying is a metaphor for anything that has been altered for the purpose of deception.”

  Miraculously, the following morning Jordan’s fever was gone. Katrina was quick to point out the benefits of going to church even if we were blocked entry, correlating it with Jordan’s sudden recovery, and then summed it up with, “So now we can go to Disneyland!”

  I knew she had been praying for some sort of divine intervention, although I wasn’t sure if her motives were out of concern for her brother, or out of her desire to go to Disneyland.

  Nevertheless, I marveled at her childlike faith … and wasn’t that what the whole World-the-Round Trip was about? If September and I hadn’t had childlike faith, we wouldn’t have left California.

  “I suppose we can,” I said, agreeing with Katrina’s analysis. “You just never know what’s going to happen on the World-the-Round Trip!”

  16.

  Nipple-Nibbling Fish

  December 21–January 2

  Thailand

  One day the Human Genome Project will discover the mutation that causes people, such as my dear wife, to ignore Mother Nature’s self-preservation impulse and do things like cross police lines during WTO riots. I knew September had inherited it from her mother, with whom we were now rendezvousing, for Christmas in Thailand. Marie, aka Granny, would apply her own special blend of nurture to our group dynamic. Adding a counter to the eccentricity was September’s law-abiding cousin, Melissa, who needed a break from her high-stress job.

  We hadn’t been in Bangkok an hour when Granny and Melissa showed up at our hotel. The kids spent the next several hours telling Granny everything we had done in the last six months, in one long run-on sentence without breathing once. Luckily, Granny had been able to score a power cable for my e.brain before she came and I had to endure Jordan’s taunts that I was “brain dead” no longer. No sooner than I could charge my e.brain than we were on our way to the island of Ko Tao, in the Bay of Thailand.

  Katrina’s Journal, December 23

  … after we got off the ferry to Ko Tao, we rode in the back of a truck to our beach bungalow. Actually, all the taxis are like that here—you just hop into the back of the truck. There are no seat belts or anything. It’s a little bit dangerous, but I like it a lot. Our bungalow is right on the beach and has big boulders by it. We climbed the boulders with Granny.

  It was Christmas Eve and we bought a potted palm tree and decorated it and our rooms with tinsel and garlands that Granny had brought. “I also brought a treat!” Granny said, as she revealed the ingredients for s’mores hidden within her suitcase.

  As the sun was setting over our beach bungalow we made a bonfire, burned piles of marshmallows, and started singing Christmas carols as loudly as we could with mouths stuffed. “Would you like to join us?” I asked some Australians who happened by. They curled their noses at the sight of chocolate mixed with marshmallows.

  “We could get some Vegemite for these marshmallows, if you’d like,” I offered.

  But they declined in a very Australian sort of way, which consisted of a graceful taunt and a put down about our country, which we interpreted as “We would be happy to join you if you had beer and sang different songs.” They kept moving along the beach to be with the rest of the young backpacker types who pretended they were too cool to notice that it was Christmas Eve.

  • • •

  Ko Tao was to be a relaxing vacation from our travels, meaning no structured activities. We sort of failed on that, chartering a boat to take the six of us snorkeling one day. The captain brought his wife and two-year-old son as well as a bunch of squished, overripe bananas. “I hope that’s not lunch,” Jordan whispered to me, pointing at the bananas.

  At our first stop, I quickly donned my fins and mask and jumped in while the rest of the group were still on the boat sorting out equipment. The water seemed to boil over with a kaleidoscope of colorful fish. I could clearly see the bottom, about 20 to 30 feet down. We were in a city of huge sea urchins and I went down to get a closer look at them.

  When I surfaced for air everyone on the boat was squealing with delight. Only then did I notice why the water was roiling with fish; the captain was tossing the overripe bananas into the water, driving the fish crazy.

  These were the varieties of fish you might see in an average saltwater aquarium, about four to six inches long and brilliantly colored with all shades of the rainbow, and utterly harmless. Fish are pretty stupid, yes? I thought so, too. It turns out that fish are stupid, but not as stupid as I am.

  I decided to lure the fish over to me by pretending I had food. It worked. Soon I was surrounded by hundreds of eager mouths, each about the diameter of a soda straw, looking for a handout. It was about this time that I noted the captain was feeding the fish from inside the boat; whereas I was pretending to feed them while in the water. All the little fishies were very cute when viewed from far away, but less so when they were brushing against me with their mouths working furiously to find something to fill them.

  A little voice in my head told me it was time to stop pretending I had food and to get the heck out of there. No sooner had I decided to obey the voice when one of the little fishies found something to munch on. Not to be too graphic, but the water was a bit cold for a warm-blooded mammal such that my, er, “headlights” were on high beam. So this fish took a mouthful of the one thing that was poking out—my right nipple.

  A blood-curdling scream ripped through the air. Or it would have, had I not been under two feet of water at the time. My scream just sort of gurgled out pathetically, unheard. It was now clear why September had refused to breastfeed after the kids had sprouted both upper and lower incisors.

  While making my getaway from the nipple-nibbling fish, all I could think of was how in some future scenario I would be lying in a morgue while someone was trying to identify my remains:

  “Scar on knee—check. Scar from appendectomy—check. Right nipple missing—check. Yup—that’s him all right.”

  It’s funny how your brain works when flooded with adrenaline.

  I spent the remainder of the day snorkeling with my arms folded resolutely across my chest, hands tucked under my armpits. Everyone else in the group spent the day snickering conspiratorially, sneaking bits of food into the water wherever I happened to be.

  Jordan’s Journal, December 27

  Today I ordered lemonade from a restaurant. It tasted horrible! Mom said they must have accidentally put salt in it instead of sugar. We sent it back and the new one tasted the same. We sent that one back, too and told
them it was salty. The new one had even more salt! Apparently, they like salty lemonade in Thailand. When we asked them to make one with sugar, they looked at us like we were from Jupiter.

  Before we knew it, we had spent a week accomplishing nothing. September’s cousin Melissa had that thing called a “job” where she did something called “work.” This all sounded vaguely familiar, but we tried to talk her out of returning anyway. Initially she considered ignoring this “job,” but something called “guilt” came into play and she was off to Bangkok to catch a flight back home. Granny was going to travel with us for a while longer.

  After we bid Melissa adieu, September announced, “I’m bored here.”

  “Boring can be good,” I said. “I’m boring, and I’m good.”

  “Yes, be that as it may, I have something else in mind.”

  “Don’t tell me. You want to find a nice police line and cross it to keep ourselves entertained.”

  “Sort of. It’s just that the line I want to cross is the border into Cambodia. I want to go see Angkor Wat.”

  I didn’t know much about Angkor Wat, just that it’s a huge temple complex, known to be one of the world’s premier archaeological sites and considered a “must-see” on the Southeast Asia circuit. I was happy just to watch the sunset from our beach bungalow and work on retaining my one remaining nipple. I lobbied against going to Cambodia (the ruins of Angkor Wat being our sole reason to go there) because we had seen countless ruins and temples.

  “If I have to put one toe inside another temple, I’ll explode!” Jordan cried when I leaked the information about his mother’s plans at lunch.

  That’s my boy! I was completely willing to let Jordan take the blame for us not going to Cambodia.

  Unfortunately, September has the exasperating trait of being one step ahead of me, and she really wanted to go. “Jordan,” September casually commented, “I’m not sure children are allowed to go to Angkor Wat.”