by Jeremy Bates
“Gaston Green.”
“Do you have a booking, Mr. Green?”
“A booking? Yes, I suppose. I have booked out the entire restaurant.”
“How large is your party exactly?”
“You do not understand. There is no party. No reservation. I am running an event there—”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Green, but I don’t speak English well—”
“I am not speaking English! I am speaking Japanese!”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand—”
I jabbed the button to end the call.
Supa-san was watching me with concern.
“At least the restaurant exists,” I quipped.
Chapter 10
Supa-san excused himself from the Special Examination Room. I used the alone time to try to get my head around the enormity and impossibility of the predicament I found myself in.
Was Taured in fact this so-called Andorra? Was I delusional? Had I had some sort of stroke on the plane? Were my wires crossed?
I almost wished this were the case, but I knew it wasn’t, as my confiscated passport was from Taured.
It’s got to be a joke, I decided. Some hidden camera reality TV program like Candid Camera. But why would such a show target me? And weren’t they going too far with it? On Punk’d or Scare Tactics, the victim was always let in on the prank after a short time. He or she was never held for over fourteen hours.
I recalled that old Michael Douglas movie in which his character’s estranged brother buys him a “game” for his birthday that integrates with his everyday life, ultimately blurring the lines between reality and fiction.
Could this airport detention fiasco be a similar kind of game then? But who would go to the trouble of signing me up to something so elaborate and outlandish? Not to mention why would Japan’s Bureau of Immigration ever go along with it?
An accompanying line of thinking made the hair on the nape of my neck stand on end:
You’re crazy. It’s the only explanation. You’re crazy and you don’t even know it, because that’s how it works with crazy people. They don’t even know it.
Supa-san returned to the Special Examination Room, sweating and bowing. He sat in his chair and set my identify cards on the table. “You may have these back for now.”
“For now?” I retrieved the cards and slid them back into my wallet. “Would you mind if I used your phone again?”
“Who would you like to call this time?”
“My mother. She lives in Taured. She has lived there her entire life.”
“Please.” He took his phone from his pocket and passed it to me.
“What is Japan’s international access code?”
“Zero-one-zero.”
I punched this in, then Taured’s country code, then my mother’s six-digit telephone number (Taured’s population wasn’t large enough to warrant the use of area codes).
With my mouth suddenly bone-dry, I held the phone to my ear, anticipating the conversation that would ensue when I explained to my mother that I was being held against my will in Japan because the immigration officials claimed Taured did not exist—
Another prerecorded voice told me the call was not successful. I glanced at the screen to make sure I had dialed the right number. I had.
“You said zero-one-zero?” I asked Supa-san.
He nodded.
“You are sure?”
“Very sure, Mr. Green. You are sure you dialed the right number?”
“I call my mother once a month,” I said, shaking my head. “I do not understand…”
Supa-san leaned back in the chair. “Tell me, Mr. Green,” he said, once again polishing his eyeglasses with the end of his tie. “What is Taured like this time of year?”
“Why?” I asked woodenly. “Plan to visit?”
“Is it humid like Japan?”
“The summers are cool and dry.”
“And winters?”
“Snowy.”
“It is small?”
“No more than five hundred square kilometers.”
“The population?”
“Seventy-five thousand.”
Supa-san began nodding.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s just that your description of Taured could very well have been a description of Andorra.”
A queasy feeling rocked my stomach. “Is that so?”
“What is the mother tongue of the people in Taured? I cannot decide if your accent is Spanish or French.”
“French,” I said.
“What about the flag? What does it look like?”
“It is blue, yellow, and red.”
“Very similar to Andorra’s, only Andorra’s has a coat of arms in the middle.”
“What are you getting at, monsieur?”
“I just find it interesting. All these similarities between the two countries…but differences too.”
“I know what you are thinking,” I said. “You think I am making this all up. But I am not. I was born in Taured. I grew up in Taured. I never heard of the name Andorra before you told it to me.” I spread my hands. “Am I crazy? Am I sick? Crazy or sick enough to get a phony passport made up to reinforce my delusion? Maybe, but it does not feel like that to me.”
“Admittedly, it doesn’t to me either, Mr. Green,” Supa-san said. “I have never experienced a case such as yours.”
“What is going to happen to me?” I asked. “You cannot keep me in this room indefinitely—”
The door opened, and Wakako Shimizu entered.
“Your name was not registered to seat 6-A, Mr. Green,” she told me without preamble. “The seat was unassigned. And there was no red Ben Sherman suitcase in the Baggage Claim Office.”
I wasn’t surprised by these revelations—baffled, angry, desperate—but no longer surprised.
“And Hallie Smith?” I asked.
“No passenger by that name on Flight JL077.”
I closed my eyes, feeling as though I were at the bottom rung of a greased ladder with no hope of ever getting to the top.
The immigration officials were speaking to me.
“…but without a valid passport your entry into Japan is denied…”
I looked at Supa-san. “Am I getting deported?”
“That would be the usual procedure,” he replied. “But in your case, we can’t deport you to a country that doesn’t exist.”
“You can deport me to the Philippines. That is where I boarded the plane. That is where I live.”
“That’s what you say, Mr. Green,” Wacky said. “But without a valid passport—”
“It is valid!” I bellowed. “Taured exists!”
Her hands balled into fists. “Tell us your real name.”
“Gaston! Gaston Green!”
“Where is your real passport?”
“You took it! You have it—”
“Enough!” Supa-san barked, raising his voice for the first time. He dabbed his forehead with his handkerchief. “I am sorry, Mr. Green,” he continued more reasonably. “But we have run out of time to help you resolve this matter.” He unclipped a piece of paper from his clipboard and slid it across the table to me. “Please sign here.”
The script was Japanese hiragana. I had no patience to decipher the words.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“It’s an appeal form,” he explained. “It says you have three days to appeal to the Minister of Justice.”
“Appeal?” I frowned. “Appeal what?”
“Your detention, Mr. Green,” Wakako Shimizu said, smiling with smug satisfaction. “You are under arrest.”
Chapter 11
A pair of armed security guards handcuffed me in the Special Examination Room before marching me through the airport, which was bustling with morning travelers, many of whom gave me disapproving looks. I kept my chin up and my gaze directly ahead until we emerged outside in a private parking lot. The guards loaded me onto a white coach with tinted windows
and two emergency light bars on the roof. They directed me through a cage system that separated the vehicle’s front bulkhead and the large holding area. There were seats for perhaps forty detainees in the latter, though I counted only six other men, all of Asian descent. Making as little eye contact as possible with any of them, I took a seat and stared blankly forward.
The driver shifted the coach into gear and weaved through the scramble of airport roads into the grim-gray morning. Through the perforated steel covering the windows, I watched the rice paddies and pastoral towns drift past, barely registering the scenery. Supa-san had told me my destination was the Tokyo Detention House. This, he clarified, was not a hotel such as the Narita Airport Rest House where I had stayed in relative comfort the previous night. It was a correctional facility run by the Ministry of Justice. In not so many words, a prison. And although I had never stepped foot inside a prison before, I had a pretty good idea what life there would be like: physical abuse and mental anguish, solitary confinement and suicides, overcrowding and malnutrition. Riots, hierarchies, gangs, rape. The list of horrors went on and on.
I didn’t know how I was going to endure even a day under such conditions, only that I had no choice in the matter. This understanding was what truly terrified me. My freedom and many of my rights had been forfeited. I was at the mercy of correctional guards and hardened criminals and, God forbid, a sadistic warden.
As the white coach sped along the highway, I repeated to myself that I hadn’t done anything wrong and that my incarceration would be resolved within a day or two at most…though this did little to banish the brooding fear in the pit of my being.
Part II
Tokyo Detention House
Chapter 12
The hulking form of the X-shaped Tokyo Detention House rose against the depressing sky, dwarfing the nearby apartment buildings and houses. The coach passed through a metal perimeter fence that appeared no different than those around suburban schoolyards. I could see no coiled concertina wire nor intermittent watch towers. These observations might have lifted my spirits somewhat had the prison complex itself not been so forbidding. Twelve stories of austere concrete, it resembled a fortress out of some dystopian future, and I thought:
Some people never come out of prison again. Some people die in prison.
Was I going to be one of those statistics?
The coach passed through an entrance gate with a vertical sign that read:
東京拘置所
I recognized the kanji for TOKYO, and though I didn’t have time to work out the rest of the translation, I figured it would be DETENTION HOUSE.
The coach slowed to a stop when we reached the back of the mammoth building. Several guards joined the two in the front bulkhead. Barking vitriolic commands in Japanese, they ushered us off the vehicle and through a pair of glass doors. Inside the reception area, the guards disbanded our motley group of detainees. One shoved my shoulder, directing me down a hallway. He ordered me to stop in front of a cell with Perspex walls. He opened the door with a key, nudged me inside, and shut the door again with a solid shuh-clack. There was no interior handle.
I watched the guard amble off down the hallway the way we had come. I paced in the cramped space. I was a bundle of nervous energy, and I likely could have run a twenty-kilometer marathon right then had I the freedom.
The freedom.
No, I wasn’t going to think about that now. No thinking about the future either. Just the present. As long as I focused on that, I could get through this nightmare, one hour at a time.
I continued pacing for the next fifteen minutes, constantly looking through the clear walls for whoever was supposed to fetch me. Eventually all the back and forth was making me go nutty. I sat down on the concrete bench. When another fifteen minutes passed, and still no one came for me, I laid down on my back, my feet near my rear, my knees in the air. There was no way I could sleep right then, yet I closed my eyes. I played over the exhaustive interview with Supa-san and Wakako Shimizu from every angle, but I had no new insight into my predicament.
After Wacky had smugly declared that I was under arrest, I had asked—and been denied—the opportunity to make a phone call. I’d wanted to call Blessica in the Philippines, to get her to contact the Tauredian embassy, so at least somebody with authority would know I had been arrested.
Oh, Gaston, I could imagine Bless saying to me, without a care in the world, had I been able to get in touch with her. Arrested in Japan, you say? Why am I not surprised?
We’d met during my first year in the Philippines at an event I was hosting. I’d organized a large fair with tents from several different vendors in Bonifacio Global City, an affluent financial/residential district in Manila. I was doing my rounds, making sure everyone was enjoying themselves, offering my usual whisky-tasting spiels, when I spotted Blessica standing next to a table laden with countless bottles of Glenfiddich and glasses stacked on top of one another pyramid-style. She was with several friends, all of them dressed to the nines in classy dresses, designer handbags, and high heels. There didn’t seem to be much of a middle class in the Philippines. The majority of the population was poor, and the rest were rich, and it was those in the latter category who attended my events. They were often a young crowd, the sons and daughters of politicians, business tycoons, self-made entrepreneurs, media and banking magnates. Many worked in glamorous industries such as film and TV, or fashion, while just as many were full-time socialites. They drove new cars, lived in gated neighborhoods, partied incessantly, and in general didn’t seem to have a care in the world.
Blessica fit squarely into this second group. Her relatives came from society, her money from a trust. She’d never strayed from her deb-socialite path, and she eventually co-founded an events company representing a portfolio of luxury brands such as Gucci and Cartier. We fell for each other hard and started spending all of our free time together. She seemed to know everyone of importance in Manila and showed me to the trendiest restaurants and clubs on a nearly nightly basis. On my birthday she took me to a bar I had been to countless times before, only on this occasion she led me to a coat check room, an anachronism in a city in which the average temperature could be described as sweltering. We donned fur-lined jackets that didn’t belong to us, and a staff member revealed a secret door that led to a freezing cold room composed entirely of ice. It was packed with beautiful people all wearing identical fur-lined jackets and drinking elaborate cocktails.
I proposed to Bless five months after we’d met, and we were married on the island of Boracay the following year. My mother and brothers flew over from Taured, and I think they were blown away by the lavish ceremony (the Porta-Potties, which had been transported from the mainland by helicopters, featured marble sinks and gilded mirrors). In any event, they enjoyed themselves and got along easily with Blessica’s family and our friends, and just so my eldest brother Paul would never forget the experience, he got a middle-of-the-night tattoo of a rubber duck across his back (which he swears he doesn’t regret). Bless and I stayed with them on the island for the remainder of the week before returning to Manila and seeing them off at the airport (where Paul continued to deny regretting the tattoo). Bless and I honeymooned in northern Australia. Two months later, in March 2011, she fell pregnant with Damien, who would be born on Christmas Eve, and who, through no fault of his own, would cause everything to unravel between us in the coming years—
An alarming thought unrelated to all the previous ones caused me to snap open my eyes and sit up straight.
I was in an observation unit. Guards were likely watching me on a video monitoring system right then. Making sure I wasn’t going to freak out, inflict self-harm, or suffer a thunderclap heart attack from the stress and shock of my incarceration. And they were more than likely forming their first impressions of whether I was innocent or guilty. Because the innocent pace, fidget, and perhaps cry.
The guilty sleep.
“I was not sleeping,” I said out loud.
I went to one clear wall and pressed my nose to the Perspex and indeed saw a video camera mounted high on the nearby wall, pointed at me.
I stared at it for a long moment, then began pacing once more.
Chapter 13
After about an hour, two prison guards transferred me from the observation unit to a room similar in shape and size to Narita’s Special Examination Room, only this one featured concrete slabs for walls. There was a scale and stadiometer in the corner, as well as a blood pressure cuff and pressure gauge on a table, along with a few other miscellaneous medical items.
The guards removed my handcuffs and left. I sat down in one of the hard plastic chairs. A neat man in gray trousers and a white sweater over a plaid button-up entered the room. He wore a white surgical mask over his mouth.
“I am a medical doctor here at the Tokyo Detention House,” he said in English from behind the mask. His voice was sonorous and clear. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” I told him.
“What language do they speak in your country?”
“French.”
“I don’t know French. English will be okay?”
“Yes,” I repeated.
The doctor got down to business, recording my height, weight, and blood pressure in a green file folder. He asked me a constellation of questions related to my health, education, and profession. I wasn’t sure why he wanted to know what degree I’d earned in university, or what I did for work, but I suspected it had something to do with my security classification that would determine what part of the prison I would be held in, and what work programs I would be enlisted in.
I nearly told him the questions were unnecessary, as I wasn’t going to be in the prison for long, my incarceration was a mistake, until I realized how many times he had likely heard such declarations of innocence.
“Please remove your clothes,” he said without looking up from the folder in which he was writing notes.