The man is on the first leg of his journey home; he remembers a trip to a diner earlier that day
“Well, I’m not in Kansas anymore,” the passenger thinks with some relief as the vessel’s captain announces they are now flying over Arkansas – en route to Atlanta, Georgia.
He was supposed to have flown out of Kansas City, Missouri to London’s Heathrow on his way back to Kyiv, Ukraine. But whoever was in charge now – of only some parts of the country, it seemed – about a week ago told him and the relatives he was visiting in Kansas that they would not be allowed to cross the state line into Missouri. He would have to fly out of the small airport in Wichita, Kansas, to Atlanta, from where he could board a plane to London. From there, he’d be able to catch his connecting flight to Kyiv, no problem, if he acted pronto to rearrange his flight plans.
“I can’t believe they forced me to add another leg to my trip,” he says half audibly through clenched teeth, sliding his lumbar region under the safety belt and jamming his lowered right shoulder into the cushion of his seat as he turns his back on the fuselage to look out the window and perhaps close his eyes for a light sleep. Clouds slip past and drops of defrost still flick off the wing.
“I can’t believe it was so damn cold there.”
The passenger closes his eyes and the waves in his brain start to change, sending him into that other, temporary, world, away from the living. But as soon as his head nods down he starts awake again, and then, even with eyes closed, he is no longer able to get there, tormented by erotic memories of the visit; roiling sexual fantasies trapped in some kind of strange, frightening, nigh nightmarish totalitarian police nation inexorably gaining ground and taking shape, superimposing itself over the old, familiar map of the continental United States.
“Has everyone gone crazy?! Has everyone lost their fucking minds?!”
He remembers – earlier that same day…
They approach a roadblock and the SUV is waved over by two submachine gun-toting New Nation guards; the initials G.R.A.M.P.S. boldly stitched in a half-circle of thick gold thread under a braided arch on the upper right-arm sleeves of their beige-green winter coats.
Father, behind the wheel, mother, passenger side, daughter and son in the back, each produces their new Midwest Territory, Kansas Sector ID fold; the guest, who is also sitting in the back, knows he must relinquish his passport. The electronic ticket and flight plan are already in there. It’s better to give them all the information upfront, he knows.
They ask the visitor in the back to step out. One guard leads him some paces forward of the vehicle in what looks like a showy effort to create the impression before this family that they are doing everything in the open, on the up-and-up.
The one guard proceeds to ask the visitor questions while back at the SUV the father sits behind the wheel bravely trying to make small talk with the other guard, who’s not all that bright. The mother sits by tensely, eyes riveted somewhere on the horizon of snow-covered fields, the relative from Belfast a troublesome talking-gesturing blur in the immediate foreground. She doesn’t want anything taken from them, no expropriation of their property, no quartering of these people in their house, or the use of their house and land for their G.R.A.M.P.S. purposes, feeding them and providing for their welfare at the family’s expense – my God, the children; the girl, just becoming a woman – if that happened, that would be it; it would be over… over… my God… my God…
“Belfast, eh? United Kingdom.” Mercifully, the guard asking the visitor questions is a whole bunch brighter than his partner back at the car.
“Yes, that’s right,” the visitor says.
“What’s your connection to Kyiv?”
“Oh, ah, I live there – with my wife.”
“Is she Ukrainian?”
“Oh, no, ah, she’s, ah, she’s, ah, Cana… from Newfoundland.”
“Meet there, work there, what…?”
“Oh, well, we met there and we work there, together, I mean, um, well, I’ve got my own company, and we work together.”
“That would be NAP Publishing Works, co-owned –”
“Ah, yes, yes, that’s right. I’m –”
How did they know about that? That wasn’t in any of the papers he gave them to check.
“And so you’re flying there via London has nothing to do with your British citizenship?”
“Oh, no, no, it was only the cheapest route. I planned it out months ago – on the Internet. That’s just a coincidence. I mean, the citizenship, and… I mean, if you look at the schedule, I connect flights in London within hours. It’s not like I’m getting out and going home – that is, in Belfast.”
“No, no, we see that. That sounds great.”
The guard seems very pleased – in a way that can’t be faked. He grows almost friendly, sympathetic. His pleasure is surely genuine.
They seem to know everything about the visitor, his living, working in Kyiv. It’s as if they’d been waiting for him to drive through here with his relatives and it’s tickled them just to get a firsthand look. They already knew the answers to the questions they’d ask, but asked them, it seemed, just to get the measure of the man answering.
The visitor is back in the vehicle. The more intelligent guard comes around to where his dumber partner is standing and asks the father some final questions before letting them get on their way. The dumber one stands by, gaping and gawking, an imbecile leer pulled across his face.
“So, where you folks heading?”
“Oh,” says the father, at somewhat greater ease (the mother praying that they just finally go), “we just wanted to give our cousin here a warm sendoff before getting him to his plane in Wichita, so we decided to treat him to a nice big steak lunch at the Lone Prairie Arms – just down the road.”
“The Lone Prairie?!” the stupid one shouts. “We nilated that one last month – and but good!”
“What’s that?” the father says. “You mean it’s gone?”
“No,” the smarter one says. “What Nigel here means is that we sort of shut it down and turned part of it into the local administration for one of our ministries.”
“Well,” says Nigel, somewhat aggravated by his smarter partner’s interjection, “that all depends what criter-on you goes by, Zack! And anyways, they wouldn’t get there even if they tried. The road’s completely blocked off!”
“Well, now, Nigel, that’s why we’re here, ain’t it? Why don’t you folks just drive up about another quarter mile and take the left turning. If you go down that ways another mile or so, you’ll see a diner on your left – hell, I don’t know its name; don’t suppose it even got one – just Diner, I guess – and anyways, if it’s steaks you want, it fries up some of the best ones I’ve ever tasted, no worse than the Lone Prairie Arms used to, I reckon. Ate there once, long time ago, during the Other Times. Can’t say I remember it being any more superb in any way from the diner, except maybe the price.”
“That’s right, honey,” the mother dares chime in, forcing a crackling laugh. “I know the place the man’s talking about. That sounds like a great idea! I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before…”
“That’s right. You folks just roll along now. We’ll call on up ahead to let them know you’re coming.”
“Well, thank you very much,” says the mother. “That’s very kind of you. Let’s go, honey! Goodbye, sirs – goodbye!”
“Well, goodbye, now…”
The two guards stand aside. The father raises the windows closed through the power bestowed to the tip of his left forefinger by a switch. He puts the vehicle into drive and back onto the road.
Filed January 11, 2015