Just Another
short story
let author read it to you: https://trowbridgedispatch.iamaiken.com/p/just-another-audio
“What room are you in?” the boy asks in the elevator.
That Sam answers honestly shocks me.
The boy then asks, “How many languages do you speak?”
I explore: why would an eight-year-old ask a stranger, a tourist, such questions in a hotel elevator in Québec City. My Sam gives nothing away. She asks for eleven in French with all the pleases and thank-yous required for good manners. Sure, unlike most Americans, she accents her French with a growl and a rolling “R.”
She’s saying: “Bonjour. Onze s’il vous plait, merci.” These from the mouth of a woman who could barely communicate last night.
Innocence asks, “How many languages do you speak?”
She says, “I can order food and be polite in French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Arabic.” Except she hit each word in their native, Français, Español, Italiano, Deutch, und Arabique. She pronounces “Arabic” in French.
The boy’s eyes widen. His mother and father usher him to the door. The boy fails to release Sam’s eyes, exiting the lift with his face angled towards hers. Mom’s hand directs a left turn.
“Al wada,” acknowledging his departure in accented Arabic.
I see her as the child did, a child who looked deep into a woman who can cloak herself in ambient light. He looked deeply into my Sam and saw something many miss … today.
Most, when they see her, they hold a door or unnecessarily offer help. Some render platitudes to a woman on a cane. With practice of subjugating herself to past roles, she smiles at “dearie” and the sing-song version of “ma’am” offered by the ignorant. On good days, like this one, she rests her hand on a stick handcrafted from a maple sapling. Dried.
Polished to show the contours of the tree it was, in the stick it is.
Did this boy see the contours of the warrior that was in the woman that is?
The world would be better if everyone understood the warrior, ignoring the stick, the grey and the deep creases angling from her nares to the outer reaches of her infrequent smile. But when she does smile, it praises. When she does smile, it presents love and kindness and humor and intelligence.
I love that smile.
Years of squinting against far aways suns. Years of dirt, dust, and sand buried in each skin fold. Those scar too, don’t they? How many times have we cleared fungi and yeasts and bacteria from impossible places? How many years did the army drain her body of all, returning to me a walnut shell of a human?
The unsuspecting have offered to show her how a room key works, offered aid when suggesting she navigate to a website on a mobile phone. Stoic. And then repays such kindness with a thank you, offered in any of her twenty languages.
I softened from a girl to a figure-eight. Linear Sam sharpened.
How many languages do you speak?
That is not the million-dollar question, but from the mouth of a child, it came close. It probed deeply, didn’t it?
We arrive late, unprepared for a city that loves its traditions and formality. We, I should say, I, expect a ready meal in the hotel or at a nearby restaurant. But on a Friday night, we sit on chairs in a crowded hotel bar with seats just enough too low to induce wincing pain. Sam continues to fail at finding a position for her leg. It knocks against chair and table legs. When she holds it straight away from obstructions, staff and patrons knock it. She curls her chin down, places thumbs in each ear and her fingers pressing her eyeballs.
You don’t want to see my Sam this way.
When the staff position a charcuterie plate in front of her, she works from left to right picking up food in the Arabic way with three fingers of her right hand. Hand to mouth. Face zagged with pain, impatience, and fighting every trigger. She eats with the focus of a wolf. She catches the notice of people at neighboring tables.
People come out to be festive, to celebrate friendship, to talk loudly. That’s what people do, isn’t it? Hold a beer, a champaign flute, two-fingers of a lovely scotch while listening to the beat of familiar music. Then there’s Sam, with her leg locked straight, three fingers pinching food, moving it to her mouth, and eyes scanning the room for the next threat. Everyone knows not to touch the old dog when she’s over her bowl.
Nobody thanks her for her service as she escapes the horrors of the room. Nobody saw her cane. In fact, nobody saw her, for if they did, they may not have jostled her. Had they seen the pain on her face, they may have stepped aside begging forgiveness.
They didn’t, did they?
In the hotel room, we only have aspirin. She’d already discovered that booze was terrible. Narcotics damaging.
You don’t want to witness what I am seeing. Sam rocks in place. Thumbs over ears and her forefinger deliberately pressing her eyeballs. The rocking distresses me. Ok, so do the blanched fingertips on her eyeballs. The others in the noisy bar discretely peek at an adult woman rocking on a bar sofa.
They, the other patrons, become obvious with their stares as the food arrives. Clearly, there was no other place for us to eat. I had wished to avoid the added cost of room service. Stupid. Stupid decision. The food comes on a slate platter. Sam says, “Merci.”
The waiter responds, “Bon Appetit.”
I say, “Bon app,” while picking up a fork.
Sam starts on the left side of the plate. With two fingers of her right hand and her thumb, she lifts food. The food goes from platter to mouth. She chews, then lifts more food. She eats each calorie on the platter from left to right, even pinching the carrot kimchee. Local craft people spent years making these smoked and cured meats. Local fromageries invested months in their mature cheeses. The farmers, the makers, the kitchen staff exposed their souls in this food. Sam eats calories from left to right until she harvests her side of the platter. She then starts on the left again, trimming the dividing line between her food. She trims it two centimeters past the center.
All of them peek, stare, and silently question Sam’s behavior.
What do they see? I don’t know. Is it a woman of middling height and a sinewy composition framed like an athlete but with the focus of a lioness on a fresh kill? A woman with graying temples blocking sight and sound from her brain while rocking back and forth?
When we rise, Sam grabs her bad-day sticks, sleek, expensive carbon-fiber elbow crutches. People hinder her progress, as if they don’t see her. Anyway, wasn’t she the whacko rocking and squeezing her head? I step around her and take on the role of a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker, like the one we could see moored to the docks below.
“Pardon,” I say politely while jostling folks. Delete polite. Icebreakers are not polite to the ice. The ice moves. People move. We escape the din, the boom-boom of the bass. We escape the stares.
Sam’s “Pardon” sounds French, a bit of a growl and thwack on the last syllable that I can’t replicate. In cleaving the crowd, I leave little doubt to the 98.5% of the native French speakers here that I am 100% anglophone.
C’est la vie.
A dreadful night of ghosts, pain, anger, frustration, disappointment, and bone-deep restlessness result in a raw mattress showing at the bottom two corners and sheets/duvet tangled to ugly knots. Survival mode, for both of us. At home, she retreats from our bedroom to a chair, a fireplace, and half-drunk glass of whiskey.
She does the which sticks dance as we dress for the arctic chill visited upon us this April Saturday. Carbon-fiber provides more support and lets her travel further. The maple stick is cool looking, rustic, and passes for a hiker’s pole. The carbon-fiber elbow crutches announce: “Gimp approaching.” The maple stick says, “Hiker coming.” She spins the maple stick then snaps a bit of close-order drill: order arms, present arms, and when I look, she snaps an armed-guard salute my direction. Saturday shows hints of her inner Puck.
I prescribe feet-on-the-ground and a day of adventuring. Who cares if it is blowin’ a hooley straight from Baffin Bay? The Maple Leaf flags and the blue Fleur-de-lis of Quebec Province stand straight out. We did it. Ferry to nowhere. Carriage ride, where Sam stands to talk history and battles with our guide. Who knew that Québec had been invited to join early congressional meetings in the baby United States? But everyone there remembers the British invading, several times. We tour old wars in a horse-drawn carriage.
We erase our Sunday plans, opting to watch the fog and ice roll into the city from the 14th floor. We erase our Sunday plans to avoid driving through an ice storm that spans the entire distance from Montreal to home.
On Monday, with all three sticks and our luggage on the bell staff’s trolley, she walks and smiles. Quick with a 5-buck tip to any uniformed hotel staff, she shakes hands and passes words in French. She smiles all the way through the lobby. And to my surprise, she hops behind the wheel.
We leave QC in ice. Every road sign carries a 200-centimeter beard, that’s eight-inches to those in Liberia, Myanmar, and the U.S.
I sing. She drives.
At the border, I hand Sam my border-crosser membership card and retrieve her blue passport. The border guard drops my membership card. I suppose he drops it because he thought he was grabbing two blue passports. He looks at my Nexus card and scans it. He bends down squinting to see me.
“Put your rear window down.”
Sam complies. We should get her a Nexus/Global Entry card.
The border guard studies her passport. It nears its own expiry. He thumbs through the booklet. It is clean, clear of stamps, apparently unused, and apparently new. He folds it back seeing a loose thread in the stitched binding. The thread-end sticks up. Ever looked? There are two threads running the height of the passport. The threads leave a dashed pattern alternating two-millimeter blue with two millimeters of white. The guard picks at the thread making it stand taller. He flicks through every page with precision. Returning to the opening page the one that quotes Abraham Lincoln “…And that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
“What do you have written here?” he asks Sam.
“Sir, sorry, I cannot see it.” She hits all the right tones and words for maximum politeness.
He turns her passport towards her, holding it like criminal evidence that damns the defendant.
“Oh, those? Those are the countries I have been to since that passport was issued.”
“But why are they here?”
“I wrote them there so I can remember the countries I have been too.”
I could not see border guard’s face. This seemed to be one of those conversations that ought to flow like warm water.
“There is nothing in your passport about travel.”
“I know, that is why I write them down.”
She is still smiling, but I see it changing.
“Why did you write them here?”
“Because if I need to tell someone where I’ve been, I look in my passport.” Yes, she does. I have seen her write in her passport then lock it up in our office safe. Here’s the problem. She’s one of the cool kids. She gets special benefits due to her career. I know what they are. Something like a third of the border patrol officers are military veterans. Sam expects to be understood by another in the cool-kid club. Every veteran of recent wars would understand what she is not saying and further would understand why she is not saying what she is not saying.
“Why don’t you have stamps or any records of entry?” He is annoyed now.
“Because I don’t use that passport when traveling internationally.” She holds her own. No retreat. Her smile remains at the mouth. The loving-lines at the corners of her eyes faded three questions ago.
He returns to the snagged thread. To him, maybe this is evidence of tampering, a felony. Who tampers with passports? Felons such as drug and people traffickers. He’s got a live one in an expensive Volvo. We have very little luggage and a clean car. Who travels internationally and uses multiple passports? Well, clearly felons.
“Are you a citizen of any other nation?”
“No.” The smile is fully gone. The Border Patrol guard eliminated one possibility. Sam is not a dual citizen of an EU nation nor Canada.
“Then you have to have used your passport for international travel. That is the law. So why do you have these letters written here?” He crossed the line into full-on frustration. And Sam isn’t helping him. “It is this a code?”
“Sort of. Q-8 is my spelling for Kuwait. QTR is my spelling for Qatar. That triangle is a pyramid for Egypt. The circle of stars is the EU. That stupid knot, that is Thailand.”
The question comes around one more time, “Why do you write them in this government document? It is illegal.” Oopsy. Sorry Joe Border Patrol guy, not actually illegal, is it?
“Every few years, I have to fill out a form called the SF-86. When I first did it, it was a stack of paper. Now I update a digital version of the SF-86. One of the questions is ‘what countries have you travelled to since your last update?’ When I see this question, I go get my passport from the safe, read it, and type the answer it. It is that simple.”
“Why would you do an SF-86?” He looks around the car again and sees the orange handicapped placard on the windshield.
“I have to do it for work, sir. And when I travel for my employer, I use other documents issued by them for legal international travel. Have you ever filled out an SF-86?”
He demonstrates frustration by putting my plastic Nexus card inside of Sam’s passport.
“Welcome to the United States. Do you have any fresh fruit, chickens, or meat?”
I fidget knobs on the dash, returning to the American measure system. 0C becomes 32F and the distance home about halves when the numbers convert from kilometers to miles.
“Why didn’t you tell him?”
“Tell him what?”
“Tell him that you are a colonel, full time with the U.S. Army reserve?”
“Because, I am an U.S. citizen with a valid passport. That is enough of an answer. If some border guard wants to make an issue of that, then he can. The lesson he won’t learn is that he can never know who he is greeting.”
“Wouldn’t he shit himself? Come on, that would be fun. Listen asshole, I am Lieutenant Colonel Sarah Ann Musgrave, U.S Army.”
“And what next, to prove my point, I grab my canes to stand? I saw myself as he saw me. Then what happens to the next person in line? I am no different, that needs to be his lesson. Most people can’t bully their way through a border crossing, can they? Then I should not have too either, should I? I am just another American coming home. End of.”
In five days of travel, few observed the contours of the warrior molded throughout the woman next to me. They saw the stick, the sticker, the angular face of a woman fading to the invisibility of age. The border guard saw something else, didn’t he?