Hot Little Hands (32 page)

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.

Gallagher is staring at his computer when I walk partway to where he is. “What?” he says.

“Is it possible to get a drink that isn't water?” I ask. “A juice or soda? Something with sugar or caffeine? I'm not feeling—”

“No,” he says. “Sit down.”

He's going over some papers with Miller when he notices me watching them. “Keep looking over here and you're going in that cell,” he says. I look away.

Five hours from now I'll be on an airplane, drinking a beer and watching
Wanderlust,
feeling like Justin Theroux might be the most attractive man in the world, but probably just because he's not wearing a uniform or carrying a gun.

Half a day after that, I'll be at the American consulate in Istanbul, talking to officers with walls for faces. Two days later I'll be in a middle seat on a flight to Heathrow, having nightmares that I'm still locked inside a jail cell until I remember the half pill in my pocket, and take it to knock myself out.

Six weeks from now, I'll be camped out on the sofa bed at my parents' place, surrounded by my suitcase and all my stuff, staying up late at night to talk to my American friends online. Telling them to come visit me and not believing them when they say they will. Asking Lars to forgive me so we can get the band back together. And when I finally tell them all the story of how I got deported, they'll laugh at how scared I was for them to know. “What did you think we'd say?” my friend Amanda will ask. “Everyone knows the system's broken.”

Four months from now, I'll get my period for the first time since being deported, because my body will have recovered from the stress. I'll rent a room in a friend's flat in Dalston. Luke will send me my computer and I'll update my CV and apply for postdocs and teaching jobs. Nine months later, he and Lydia will get married at San Francisco City Hall, and they'll text me the photos from the steps out front.

Three years from now, I will still not be allowed back into the States. I'll just be watching it from afar, like everybody else. And strangely, it will only be when I'm in yoga class, holding certain poses, that I'll remember myself back there, in the Bay Area, as though the memories are somehow locked inside my muscles. Riding my bike up Guerrero Street. Walking into the café and seeing his face. Day-drinking margaritas in the park, not too far away from places where people get locked up and sent away all the time. Before I myself got turned around and kicked out. Before I came of age long after I had come of age. Before I took the journey back to where I started, and started again.

But right now, still waiting in this room, in the transit zone, I lean my head onto Bobbi's shoulder, and doze on and off for the hours until my flight. “I really don't want to give you bedbugs,” I tell her, but she doesn't shake me off, even when I start to drool.

For my mum,

with love and thanks.

Thank you to the Stanford University Creative Writing program for bringing me to the States and teaching me so much once I arrived. Thank you to my extraordinary teachers and mentors: Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, John L'Heureux, and Colm Tóibín.

For their wisdom, faith, and perpetual good humor, thank you to everyone at Spiegel & Grau, especially Cindy Spiegel, Julie Grau, and Laura van der Veer. Enormous thanks, too, to my agents Peter Straus and Melanie Jackson, Mary Mount at Viking UK, and Ben Ball and Arwen Summers at Penguin Australia.

I am grateful for the support of the MacDowell Colony, Tin House Writer's Workshop, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ucross Foundation, and MacDowell again. I'm grateful, also, to the editors who have published my work in journals and anthologies.

Thank you to my friends, readers, and hand-holders, and especially to these amazing people, who are all three of those things: Hassan Javed, Alexandra Teague, Suzanne Rivecca, Stacey Swann, Josh Tyree, Skip Horack, Jim Gavin, Stephanie Soileau, Nellie Bridge, Ryan Brown, Andrew Braddock, Craig Cox, and Fleur, Jase, and the Market Lane team xo.

Finally, and most of all, thank you to my incredible family: Vivienne, Ross, Kate, Meg, Emily, Bren, PJ, Indigo, Jarrah, Pepper, Zeph, Woody, and D'Ange.

And a special thank-you to my grandfather, who put us to bed on Friday nights when we were kids with the story of “How Saul Met the Beautiful Lucy.” It's one of the first stories I ever knew, and it's still one of my favorites.