by Zolbrod, Zoe
When the nephew began forcing his way into the stream of traffic, she kissed her fingers and pressed them to the car’s window, but Piv had already turned from her and was glancing over one shoulder at the intersection. The way the sun hit, his profile was outlined in a golden glow. The image filled her with an emotion too big for her body; her ribs felt like a bivalve cracked open, its morsel scraped out. His refulgent lips, his flat nose, his delicate posture, his hair. His stiff hair. That didn’t look the same as it did the first time she left. She craned around to watch him pull open the door of the Star Hotel. She wanted to pound on the window, to shout to him not to give up, to keep on loving her. She fingered her neck, where a silver lotus rose to the dip of her throat. She was wearing the necklace they had made together-it didn’t complement the tailored lines of the suit, but she wanted the ballast of it, the reminder of her larger reasons, her solid goals: designing jewelry and import-export with Piv. She recited the plan again to herself: First they’d go north-the market for their jewelry would be better in New York, and she wouldn’t mind crashing with friends if it were for an exotic reason. Then they’d hop over to California-Asian-influenced stuff was big on the Pacific Coast, and flights back to Thailand would be cheaper from there. She’d wait to pay off the creditors until after she’d earned enough profit to invest in some stones and had found enough really good contacts to make more expensive designs worthwhile. And then, maybe then-if he still wanted to and they were getting along great, if they knew each other truly and could really communicate—she and Piv could talk seriously about getting married.
She touched her necklace again. Since coming back from his parents’, she’d polished the plan alone. Piv had been only polite and distant-even, with a couple of torrid but silent exceptions, during sex. If only he would let his guard down and open up to her, or at least listen to her try to open up to him. He’d surprised her with the marriage question, so she hadn’t handled it right. No one should decide about marriage after only two months; that’s what her mother and father had done, the hick and the carpetbagger—and look how that turned out. The point about her and Piv was that they were different. She wanted to explain that to him. She wished that she could go back in time so she could be cajoling him into happy postponement right now. But the car rocked forward to the airport—past Chatuchak Park, past a small shantytown roofed in green plastic, past a mall built to look like an antebellum mansion except for the neon Cartier sign on top.
“Hello. Did you have a pleasant flight?”
Robin looked up from the circling black luggage belt. The man who spoke to her was wearing a gray suit. He was Asian-complected, but his English was stateless. He didn’t look at Robin; he kept his gaze on the plastic tongues dangling from the mouth of the conveyor.
“Yes,” Robin said, startled. “Fine.” It wasn’t impossible that he was American and recognized her as a compatriot.
“Where did you come from today?” His hands were clasped behind his back, and his face was so relaxed it seemed to float. Robin dismissed the idea that they shared a nationality. Something about the man’s contained fluidity, something about his gold Rolex—or was it a knockoff?—pegged him as indelibly Southeast Asian.
“Bangkok.”
She and the man looked together at the jerking belt. An aluminum trunk emerged, the rubber tongues draped momentarily over it. A crowd of waiting passengers rustled to readiness.
“Oh,” he said. “Are you traveling for pleasure?”
Robin started. This was a question travelers answered at immigration, not one they traded in waiting-room chit-chat. She shrugged irritably. No other luggage emerged from the chute. The stickered trunk chugged forward, solitary; no one rose to claim it.
“Business, then?”
“Why do you ask? Where have you come from?” She strived for a tone of cheery curiosity.
“Oh,” he said. “The luggage for your flight will be released to another bay, bay number seven.” He stepped aside to give her room to pass. “Have a nice stay in Singapore.”
She whittled her way to the edge of bay seven’s moving belt. Despite the air-conditioning, she could feel herself begin to sweat again. Silk wasn’t absorbent. There were no windows in this wing of the airport, just vistas of putty-colored carpeting and white walls. And there was no smoking; Robin reminded herself that she couldn’t even chew gum here, in public Singapore, and the thought made her stickier. She was uncomfortable in her professional shoes; her feet wanted to spread into sandals.
A suitcase came through onto the belt. After a moment’s pause, there came another: a bright yellow hard-sider with an identifying blue ribbon tied to its handle. Robin pressed her shins up against the belt’s rail and looked toward the new luggage coming into view.
“Hello,” said a man just to her right. He was imitating her posture. “Where have you traveled from today?” His sentence structure was impeccable, but he spoke as if through a mouth full of marbles.
Robin turned to look at him. Another sepia-toned man in a platinum gray suit. “Bangkok,” she said, because to protest the question would seem unnecessarily churlish.
“Oh yes?” he said, still bending forward for the best view of luggage. “Business or pleasure?”
Robin forced herself to smile. “You’re not the first person to ask me that today.”
He straightened and turned to her. The two stood on guard. Robin offered no information. From the corner of her eye she saw a two-wheel black case pass by on the belt. Then she saw another one, a similar model. She wanted to snatch a bag and stride away, but without stooping over to read the tags, she couldn’t know which one was hers.
“Have you been to Singapore before?” he asked.
“Why are you asking me?” She tried to make her voice teatime light.
“It is just conversation.” With long fingers, the man reached into his jacket and flapped open a wallet to reveal a gold and blue seal. A roving customs officer. “I greet passengers. How long have you been in Bangkok before coming here?”
“Greet them? You mean by asking questions?” The important thing was to be calm. Why was her own shrill voice filling her ears? Waves of heat crashed over her head.
“What’s your occupation?” the man asked.
“I already told them that at immigration. Excuse me, I see my luggage over there,” Robin said. She stepped away from the man too fast; her carry-on tote bumped against him, and she jostled another suited person in her rush to get away.
On the other side of the luggage wheel, she paced behind the wall of passengers, hiking her sagging tote straps higher on her shoulder, twiddling her rings. It’d been stupid to bolt from that man. She needed to act normal. She needed to act normal, because something was wrong. Something was going to go wrong, and the best thing she could do would be to leave the suitcase circling in the airport and walk cleanly away without drawing attention to herself.
Shut up, she told herself. You’re paranoid.
But her suspicions kept pulsing. She scanned the crowds. They were on to her, on to something. She should leave empty-handed. Without the case that Abu packed for her she was as innocent as if she’d never done anything, never known a thing. She just had to bend over and-snip—with a flick of her army knife cut off the identifying luggage tag. The idea filled her with a rush. Home free, on her own, she’d disappear into Singapore and away from smugglers. The crowd was thinning. Best to do it now, before her bag was the only one left. She slipped her hand inside her purse to search for the reassuring fold of blades. Her knuckles bumped against a lipstick tube and the fluffy rough of balled Kleenex. And then she remembered: Piv had her knife. If she wanted to do this, she’d have to get down on her knees and rip the tag off with her teeth.
Stop it, Robin thought again. Stop it, stop it, you’re being overly dramatic. Look, there’s the customs guy talking to that chubby wife with a bad perm. He’s asking her the same questions he was asking you. You aren’t carrying drugs. This isn’t TV. Pick u
p the bag. It’s a simple task. Two days from now you’ll be in Bangkok with Piv. Hold on for two weeks and you’ll be heading home together, with something to show for your nine months away.
By now the luggage wheel was almost empty. Robin walked to the conveyor belt and slung her case to the ground. She slid out its thin metal handle. She carefully put her declarations form in between the pages of her passport. Then she joined the customs line behind a family who had a cart piled six feet high with leather-edged suitcases and cardboard electronics boxes. The queue moved slowly toward the officials who pointed travelers through one of two detectors, giving Robin enough time to will herself into a numbness that chilled away her heat. The men had red ribbons around their flat-topped hats and sat unsmiling on high stools. They eyed the form of the well-stocked family in front of Robin before giving them a quick nod.
“Where are you coming from,” they asked Robin in English, looking down at the answer in her passport, not at her. “How long were you there? What were you doing there? You’ve been in Singapore before? For how long?”
A hum rose inside her. They should be just shuffling her along, not asking questions. She moved her lips, but she couldn’t hear her own replies. Finally the man gestured for her to go. She stepped away into a tunnel of wind, a rushing of temperatures, hot and cold whooshes of relief.
But no. A pincered hand gripped her elbow.
“Excuse me. You were asked to step over there.” The man who held her was dressed in green.
Two more olive-clad men, these ones with smoky plastic gloves on, stood behind a low, wide table, waiting for her.
“I’m sorry,” Robin said. “I didn’t mean to. I just didn’t hear.” But she strained away from the hand on her arm. If it hadn’t held her, she would have been running away.
They started the search with her purse, then her tote, and as she stood there, forced to watch, her reactions played out on a split screen. On one side: indignation. Who was this man, this foreign man, sniffing her Nivea and feeling the seams of her cotton bikinis, the cups of her grayed white bra, tossing aside what she wore next to her skin? In this enactment, she was genuinely put out, offended. How could she-well-educated, well-shod, white, clean-be subjected to this invasion of privacy? The customs agent flipped through the pages of her journal, then held the covers and shook the book upside down. A postcard of Sukhothai fell out, the pretty ticket to Wat Pho that she’d been saving. She had half a mind to call a supervisor and protest.
But in the other half of her mind, on the other side of the screen, her desperate hope was that the supervisor would not be called. She cowered, humiliated. Feeling herself drenched with guilt and deserving of punishment, she still sent begging eyes to yank pity, boredom, lust-whatever it would take-from the agent so that he would turn her loose before cracking into the black case. It didn’t work. The customs official gestured for Robin to repack her tote, and her hands dutifully folded slippery rayon and recapped jars while he inspected the outer compartments of the suitcase. Inside Robin’s mind, her abject half tore at the flesh of her impervious one—she pounded, slashed, and trampled her, but the beating had little effect. The rigid denial of the supercilious American girl broke down, but the flame of entitlement that allowed her to see herself as an exception continued to burn: I deserved better. If this is what I had to do, so be it.
The officer had opened the suitcase and was pulling out a stream of women’s clothing: a red lined skirt, a bone silk blouse, a natty blazer, which was balled up. He unrolled the blazer and dipped his hands into its pockets. Abu must have packed all this, but why? For a moment, Robin’s mind emptied. She was baffled. She knew nothing. There was no fight to be had. Maybe the last months existed only in hallucination, and some other life—a real one-would present itself as soon as she blinked. Then the officer reached in farther and drew out an oversized ziplock bag. He held it in front of his face just as Robin once had. There were the horns: two earthy curves spooning; two massive, stacked apostrophes that had previously signified ownership. It’s nothing, Robin thought, steeling herself. She supposed she could feign surprise, but the effort seemed impossible. It’s nothing, she wanted to tell the man who opened the bag, sniffed, then set it on his opposite palm and lifted to test its weight. His face didn’t change as he rubbed the horns through the plastic, sniffed again, then reached in to scratch the surface. The tip of his plastic glove came out tipped with dirt.
“What’s this?” he said to her.
“Nothing,” Robin said. Nothing nothing nothing. Rhino horns. If only he would show a glimmer of interest in her, a ghost of a smile or even the erotics of wielding his power. There was still time for him to let her go. But his face was blank as he took a walkie-talkie from his belt and spoke into it.
Profanities ran through Robin’s mind, directed first at the man standing before her, but easily attacking Abu, too, and Volcheck, and the men in suits who had spoken to her earlier, and the woman at Don Muang Airport who had made her check the suitcase even though it was carry-on size, and soon the curses ricocheted and struck everyone she recently knew—fuck, fuck, fuck—fuck Piv for his cool beauty, fuck Zella for being lying and mean, fuck Yhan and his smiling German wife in Pai for the siren call of their happiness. Fuck.
The man set the horns down on the Formica table and continued through the suitcase, pulling out another set of horns as well as more women’s dress garments before a pair of men in creased khaki—the demanded/dreaded supervisors; not just one of them, but two—walked up and spoke to the searcher in Chinese. The horns passed between them until a single man ended up with both bags. He looked at Robin for the first time.
“Horn of rhinoceros. On the international list of endangered animals. According to international agreement and the law of Singapore, it is forbidden to carry this across our border. You break the law. You are in our custody.”
Three pairs of eyes glanced off her. She felt obliterated, buried, scarcely present. When questioned, she responded; her voice small, her self receding. This was not her drama after all, she sensed early on in the inquisition. She barely mattered. She said that she had been given the suitcase, that she hadn’t known what was in it. She said she was coming to Singapore from Bangkok, that she was American. But if she had hoped her nationality would suggest that their treatment of her might have consequence, her passport revealed her as backpacker flotsam: France for a month, then Italy, Greece, Turkey, where she had walked from Europe into Asia and flown on to India, then to Nepal, moving always at a snail’s pace until the recent flurry of short hops from and back to Bangkok. She had to answer to it all.
She was escorted to a holding room, a pen of blind white walls marked with a high expanse of silver one-way window, where she repeated her statements for a revolving cast of tight-lipped men. Between interrogations, she sat alone in the cold room for long stretches. She was locked in, but not bound in any way. She was free to pace, but she didn’t touch the plastic-cased horns that sat on the brown table in front of her as a testament to brute greed, the unavoidable sum of her guilt. Two hours passed, then three. She was quizzed by several teams of interchangeable men. They wanted to know how much money she had gotten for carrying the horns. Did she have the money now? They took the cash she did have and counted the big bright bills before putting them in an envelope. What was she supposed to do in Singapore? What else had she carried? All this was asked in inflectionless English. They talked among themselves more animatedly. Once, a man shorter and slighter than she was picked up both bags of horns and let them fall back down on the table with a crack. She jumped in her seat, then took her twitching hands from atop the table and sat on them.
“When did you see the suitcase for the first time?” he asked her. She couldn’t take her eyes off the horns. Her face crumbled.
The man repeated his question, and when he didn’t get an answer, he grabbed one of the horns from the bag and thrust it toward her face. She jerked back, horrified; her chair screeched.
“When was the first time you saw the suitcase?”
“This morning,” Robin said, bringing her hand to her nose and sniffling. Anticipating the questions that had previously followed this one, trying to be good, she carried on. “I didn’t know what was in it. They gave it to me at the hotel.”
But the man seemed not to listen. He and his companion headed toward the door and shut it behind them, leaving her alone again for another long hour. The fluorescent lights sizzled. It was 9:00 PM. Would the next time she slept be in a Singaporean jail? She conflated everything she’d ever heard about Southeast Asian prisons and punishment into one horrible lump and fell into a sort of trance, imagining herself sustained on a diet of worm-speckled rice and caned until her body went into shock. Would her father come visit, or would he disown her once the twinkle of her potential was gone? Would this be the news that would break her mother’s back? Robin felt a wail swelling in her chest. Then the door’s steel handle crashed against the wall as two broad-shouldered white men followed two Singaporeans into the room.
One of the Caucasians wore dark blue trousers, the other one wore a mustache and khakis. Their jackets were open, their shirts unbuttoned at the collar. They didn’t wear ties. They loped into the room, and when they sat down their knees spread wide in their roomy pants. They leaned over the table each in succession and said, “How ya doing, Robin,” while grabbing her hand and giving it a quick shake. The khaki man said, “Believe it or not, we’re from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Bet you didn’t expect to find us here, huh? You thought we stayed over there in Yellowstone.” He grinned. Robin gave him a single weak chuckle. Then the blue guy—“I’m Ray. This’s Robert”—raked his fingers through his longish forelock, rubbed his tanned, lined forehead, and said, “Now, what’s a girl like you trucking with rhino horns for? Did you need a little cash? Is that how you got yourself into this mess?”