An Ocean of Minutes

by Thea Lim

  But the swimming pool was real, bearing so many marks of authenticity. An end-of-summer emptiness tinged the scene. A little boy hovered at the pool’s edge, visualizing himself entering the blue. His father called encouragement from a deck chair, as pasty a father in the ordinary world. An older girl, late to return to college, wore a dual-toned bikini, one cup purple and one cup white, just like the one Polly had tried on in a department store the last time there was a normal summer. The only unusual mark was a sign that explained the pool’s use of all-natural salt-water-derived chlorine.

  The girl in her bikini was almost more unsettling than the foreign horrors Polly had envisioned, because her alikeness insisted that Polly’s own decent world was on the same spectrum as this one. This alien world could infect her own, until it would have to be acknowledged that strangeness and evil were everywhere, even at home.

  What was she doing? Polly got down as the little boy jumped. She got to walking as fast as she could. Now there was a small construction site, abandoned when the money ran out, bent rebar poking out of the ground like grass. She had been walking twenty minutes. She should have passed the hotel already. The road behind and in front looked exactly the same. Keep going or turn back? Keep going. But when should she stop?

  Out on the water, a switch was flicked and floodlights boomed. It was a boat. No, it was a pier, but she could not see if there was a hotel, because a hill of garbage blocked what was once the next intersection. The hill hadn’t gathered organically. It was built of tables and chairs, window frames, a tub. And it was not so much a hill as a wall, circling whatever sat in the middle. She’d have to go around it to reach the open road on the other side. Anything could be inside the wall. A harmless bus stop. Gang HQ. A nest of rats.

  She should turn back. She must have passed the Flagship site ages ago. That wasn’t true. It was a big hotel; it would have left some remains, an urn for a peace lily stuck in the sand. But there was no one else, no man to go ahead and check the hill was safe to pass. You don’t need that, she told her quaking self. Before Frank, you managed just fine.

  When she was halfway round the hill, she saw that the pier was part of a harbor. Small boats departed to meet a ship anchored a half mile out. She saw something familiar wedged in the wall, out of context, upside down, slit by animals and pounded by rain. It was a burgundy armchair from the Flagship Hotel. She had to touch it to be sure. She went to it as a man in uniform came out of the wall.

  They saw each other at the same time. They spoke simultaneously. Polly said, “Excuse me,” but he screamed, “CBP! Hands on your head! CBP!” as he drew his weapon.

  Other men streamed out of the trailer guarded by the garbage wall, maybe twelve or fifteen of them.

  “I was just going for a walk!” Polly shouted.

  Two of them snaked behind her and commanded her to move forward.

  “I was just going for a walk!” Polly cried.

  They marched her into the middle of their compound and raised their guns and made her kneel. They handcuffed her.

  “She was doing something to the wall,” said the one who had found her. “She has to be searched for weaponry.”

  “Send in Thibodeaux. Thibodeaux, you’re up.”

  Thibodeaux didn’t look old enough to be an officer. He approached her inch by inch, with dinner-plate eyes.

  “I’m going to open your shirt,” he shouted.

  “I don’t have anything,” Polly pleaded.

  He got down next to her. He was almost wheezing.

  “It’s okay, I don’t have anything,” Polly said, to calm them both.

  But their common fear did not make them friends. When he knocked her to the ground, black stars popped before her eyes. He pinned her neck with his knee and she sobbed as he jerked open two buttons near her navel. He squeezed the flesh in the opening. He pushed her on her front and used his feet to check her legs for bulk.

  “We’re clear!” Thibodeaux screamed. “No weapons!”

  Polly tried to stand up, but Thibodeaux said, “Whoa, whoa!” and kicked her in the calves.

  “Contact RB and say we’ve got a stowaway,” the captain said.

  They took her ID and left her there. There was gravel embedded in her cheek. Everything would be all right. They would have to issue an apology. She had the right to freedom of movement. Wasn’t that the law? she thought, forgetting she had not arrived in the same country she’d left.

  After what felt like an hour, a man in civilian clothing came over and said, “Put her in C,” and they took her into a small room with a table and chair, just like in the movies, and an officer guarded the door, blocking the only window. His name tag said Aguirre. The other man crossed his arms and eyeballed her, not talking.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  The plainclothes man jerked his shaggy eyebrows together. He pointed to an old bedside alarm clock, cast away on top of a filing cabinet. She could just read 21:23 on its face. This Saturday was lost. She had two more Saturdays. A fifty-fifty chance.

  There was a television screen on a card table with a typewriter keyboard attached to it. It was a computer. Polly hadn’t seen many up close before.

  “What is this place?” she said.

  “Shit. We ask the questions. Hacemos las preguntas. This is CBP. Customs and Border Protection. I’m an ICE agent. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Inmigración.”

  She could have laughed out loud. Clearly this was a misunderstanding. What could they want with her? She wasn’t a drug dealer or an arms smuggler.

  “Can you explain why you were on CBP premises? Why did you charge our wall?”

  “I didn’t. I was just going for a walk.”

  “Where were you trying to go? Why are you here? Your lodging is on the north side. You’re a long way from home.”

  “I was just getting to know the town.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me what you were looking for, exactly?”

  Polly hesitated. But what could be wrong with telling the truth?

  “I was looking for Twenty-Fifth Street.”

  “So you were trying to escape.”

  “No, I was looking for a hotel. The Flagship Hotel? Do you know where it is?”

  “You were trying to get to the Twenty-Fifth Street Port.”

  “I was looking for the hotel.”

  “There’s no backtracking now, honey. Where were you headed? Mexico? Tampa?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

  “You were trying to get to the port to hitch a ride on a boat. Don’t waste my time.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You tell me. We get an escapee every few weeks, when, if you ask me, it’s easier to finish the bond than get out of here undetected. Take you, for example. You go on the lam, only to walk right into the CBP field office.”

  She knew the longer she paused, the more it looked like she was trying to make something up. But she had to find a way to phrase the question so she’d get the information she sought. She’d done nothing wrong.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, but could you tell me if there used to be a hotel on this site, called the Flagship, where the port is now?”

  “Excuse me, sir,” said Aguirre. “Look at her record.”

  “What for?”

  “She’s not H-1. She’s O-1.”

  The agent frowned. He studied her ID.

  “We’ve never seen an O-1 escapee before. You’ve got a good deal, in relation. Why would you try to stow away?”

  “I wasn’t. I was just trying to find the hotel that used to be on Twenty-Fifth Street.”

  “I don’t care if you’re H-1 or O-1; you’re not an American. You can’t leave.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on. You heard all this when you signed up.”

  “You’re not a citizen anymore,” Aguirre said. “You left before the formation of America, ipso facto you can’t be a citizen. You’re here on a visa.”

  “
Thus, there are two terms of your visa that overlap with our area of concern,” the agent continued. “First, you are only employable by TimeRaiser. Second, you are required to stay within the jurisdiction assigned until you finish your bond. Once you finish your bond, you can apply for resident status. Then you can get on any boat you want.”

  Outside, someone was blowing a whistle. She still didn’t know where the Flagship had gone. This was now the wrong concern, but the extent of her trouble was too big for her mind to compass.

  “You’re saying I can’t leave, and I can’t work for anybody but TimeRaiser, and I’m not an American, until I finish my bond?”

  “I don’t know about that last part. You don’t automatically become an American once you finish. But, yes, you can’t be an American and enjoy our rights and freedoms while under bond. How much is there on your bond? You people usually have it tattooed to your foreheads.”

  She was seated, her soles planted on the ground, but she felt like she was falling, and she wrapped her feet around the legs of her chair.

  “Thirty-two months,” she said.

  “Don’t you make another run for it. Even if you slip the Galveston border, which you won’t, you can’t go far. You can’t use your LifeFund anywhere but at the PX.”

  Frank was an American. He could make it to the pier. He wouldn’t know she couldn’t.

  “The question for me is: What do I do with you? I could arrest you, but TimeRaiser hates that. Waste of man-hours.” He sighed. He poked his computer. “I could let you go, with an escort. TimeRaiser’s happy, I don’t have to do as much paperwork, you don’t have to go to detention.”

  Aguirre left, his boots on the stoop shaking the trailer. The agent was writing numbers and letters in each box of a form, a code Polly couldn’t understand. It took an age for his pen to make its way from left to right and top to bottom, but he’d said he wasn’t going to arrest her, so once he was done, he’d let her go. He opened a drawer and took out a stamp. He stood up and crossed the room, finding an ink pad in a basket on the floor. Delicately he rocked the stamp across the pad, then pressed it to the page. He put away these implements. He filed the form. An ache burned in her cuffed hands and her shoulders throbbed from being locked in one position. He turned to his computer. A white dot crossed a black screen and then returned to the beat of a beep. He was playing a game.

  This was a test to see if she could be obedient. She wasn’t going to fail it just because an agent was petty. Maybe they had renumbered the streets and the Flagship still waited, farther down the beach. Later, when it was safe, she could feel as bad as she wanted about this easygoing cruelty. There was a water stain on the wall and she stared at it until shapes wheeled out of the shadow.

  In 1981 she had waited until Frank was asleep in his clinic bed, and then she had gone to the TimeRaiser office alone. The clerk had explained things using words like “amortization” and “proration,” as if she should know what they meant, and she was too proud to ask for an explanation, and in too much of a hurry, before she changed her mind. The clerk had pulled out an adding machine and pelted her with numbers: $5.25 hourly pay, $6,279 for her portion of the passage, $660 for room and board, thirty-two months to work off what she owed. Babies were crying and telephones were ringing, and she wanted to get back before Frank woke up. When she told him what she’d done, for a long while he only stared at the electric sockets over his bed. There were bubbles in his plastic isolation tent, distorting his expression. “Just stay,” Frank said.

  But she couldn’t stay, because she’d seen the other patients with blood coming out of their eyes. She couldn’t stay because, one Saturday night, when they first met, he’d opened the door and said, “Why can’t spending time with you be my full-time employ?” She couldn’t stay because it could not be that she would never again watch him put on a shirt. Because when Polly’s mother died, they had let her sit with her mother’s body for as long as she wanted, and she remained for a long time, holding her mother’s scarf. There would be no more birthday cards, no more cooking lessons, no more Fridays, no more hugs in the middle of the night. Because Frank had found her ex-boyfriend Chad, and somehow—through threats or bribes, she did not know—Frank got Chad to give back her mother’s furniture. And then, for a whole month, until Polly could get a bigger storage unit, Frank had kept the furniture in his apartment. Chairs, so many chairs. Because for anything between Polly and Frank that ever went wrong, any missed phone call, separate holiday, misunderstanding, unhappy night, Polly would tell herself, Never mind, there will be other times. It can’t be that this is all there is.

  The agent only remembered Polly when she fell asleep.

  “Hey! This isn’t the Best Western.”

  He called Aguirre back into the room.

  “If we see you again, we’re charging you with trespass, we’re charging you with illegal exit, we’re charging you with terroristic intent. You understand?”

  Aguirre took her to a police van. He looped the chains bolted to the floor through her handcuffs. She could no longer feel her right hand. When they were on the road, he opened the grate between the cab and the cage and said, “I’m from Galveston. There did used to be a hotel on the sea where the port is now. But it was destroyed by a hurricane in ’93.”

  She couldn’t keep it tamped down anymore; panic geysered up. She would try anything. Maybe Aguirre would help her.

  “I have to get back to Twenty-Fifth Street. I just have to meet someone, I’m not trying to get on a boat. Maybe, next Saturday, you could let me in?”

  He was silent, then he started shouting.

  “Christ Almighty. That’s what you get for being a nice guy. You better pipe down before I take you back to holding. You made your bed, now lie in it.”

  He was right. She had signed the papers, she had agreed, and now she only had herself to blame. She had done it all without understanding the weight of what she was doing. Until this moment, the choice she’d made had kept its true, perverse nature secret: it was irreversible, and only comprehensible after it was done.

  MAY 1979

  * * *

  Frank’s father left Frank’s mother for another woman, and then he came back. If you didn’t know, you could never tell. Mrs. Marino sits at the edge of her chair, soberly conducting the distribution of food to her three sons and their women, a procession of wooden spoons and pounded meat and sturdy iceberg leaves. She is the king and her boys bring offerings to her round dinner table: comical tales of the week, requests for job advice, their dates. Mr. Marino sits back and admires, now and then sneaking a touch of her shoulder or the nape of her neck, as quiet as Polly. The rest of them all talk at once, but conversation doesn’t suffer, because they can somehow listen as they speak. They are robustly normal, the kind of family Polly used to see through living room windows on Sunday nights as she walked home on her own. Frank can see his own life in other people’s rooms, like a call and response, a sound reassuringly returned.

  But maybe there are a few hints of his parents’ troubles. When Johnny starts a story about a lady customer from the roofing company he runs with his dad—the mistress was a customer—Frank knocks over a water glass. By the time it’s sopped up, the subject’s changed. Maybe it is strange for a fifty-something to paw at his wife at the table. And it is odd how someone as sensible and solid as Mrs. Marino is so obsessed with happy endings. She is consumed with getting Carlo, her oldest, married off.

  “You remember Sylvia?” says Carlo. “From Lackawanna. Studying to be a nurse.” He and Frank are sharing a cigarette in the bushes, out of sight of the back door.

  “Big”—Frank glances at Polly—“hair?” Polly rolls her eyes.

  “Mom and Dad wanted to have lunch at the new seafood joint that opened near my work. I asked Sylvia to come, to cool Mom’s jets, stop her nagging about wives. Instead, Mom calls over the waiter and tells him we want to see the wedding package! I don’t even know the girl.”

  “Good hair, though,”
Frank says.

  This alone isn’t that strange; plenty of mothers offer unwanted assistance to single sons. Mrs. Marino is sweeter on Polly than she is on the other girls—Johnny’s wife, Pia, and Carlo’s revolving crew—even though they seem more Mrs. Marino’s kin, always wearing dresses and good at telling stories. She gives Polly extra leftovers to take home, calls her “my love.” The first time she does this, Frank gapes. Polly guesses she gets this treatment because she is a motherless child—the one perk. But then there is the Oscars thing. Once, while they were making small talk about Polly’s weekend plans to watch the Oscars, Mrs. Marino snapped. They were setting the table and Mrs. Marino slammed down a salad plate so hard Polly jumped.

  “After last year, I’ll never watch the Oscars again.”

  There had been a controversy at the last ceremony: Vanessa Redgrave’s speech, the word “Zionist.” Polly was confused. Mrs. Marino was a Catholic. Her hobbies included swimming and Tupperware. She had never mentioned the Middle East.

  “Only a bozo would like that movie. Artsy-fartsy, and in the end the couple doesn’t even get together! Nasty, pointless show, and they gave it Best Picture!”

  Now Polly knew what she was talking about, but she didn’t understand. “Annie Hall?”

  “Don’t even say the name.” Another plate slammed, narrowly avoiding destruction.

  “Ma?” Frank came in, dishrag in hand, to make sure they were all right.

  But perhaps the greatest clue of their marital unease is how curiously, worryingly frenzied Mrs. Marino is about the anniversary party.

  “Which wedding anniversary is it?” Pia asks innocently, one dinner.

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “Is that a thing?” Johnny says.

  “Well, we missed twenty-five.” Their twenty-fifth year, Mr. Marino was with the other woman.