Dry Ireland, Wet Grave

I’m on a RyanAir flight from London Luton Airport. Shit airport. Delayed. Seats too narrow. Weather a factor. I need to get out of my head. Get out of my habits. About six months ago I was grinding for the US government. My house is now a prison, and Ireland my temporary reprieve.

If you go to Ireland to dry out then you can imagine my state. Imagine a dry Ireland. I could, and I would. The sky could not. It was near the tail end of storm Isha. The rain and wind were fucking angry. The plane lands sideways. I make it to the rental car place, and drive to Knappagh just south of Westport, County Mayo.

I had found an old rectory that at one time offered writing retreats. On that property there is a cabin. It’s nestled in the woods, private, and not within walking distance to a pub. Perfect for my dry Ireland. I arrive in a driveway full of mud, branches littering, at dusk, the cabin in utter darkness. It’s unlocked. Freezing inside. No power, no heat.

The storm is in full effect. Oddly, Isha is the Muslim call to prayer when darkness falls and there is no scattered light in the sky. True to form this night. Just the agony of creaking trees and the spite and sting of rain on the face.

I pull blankets from every corner of the cabin and find the bed. I’m wrapped, swaddled, shivering. It’s been a shit day and I’m going to sleep, or try my best. But all night there are ghosts about. Howling. Tapping. Noisy fucking ghosts.

Morning. The sun is out. The wind and rain have stopped for now. I step out of the cabin and see the looming shadow of a an abandoned stone church just steps from me. This is the Ireland I wanted. The driveway is littered with leaves, the clouds not sure of their next move, but the church is a beacon of some sort.

The trod to the the church is a tangled slog of mud and wood. I’m a bit wobblily, unfortified. I get there. Slate roof, tall broken windows, and the doors are locked. I tried the doors. I promised my daughter I would. The church is surrounded by those jagged sheets of slate that had come off the roof. I hadn’t considered this before. Fuck, they would be deadly in a storm, like last night.

The churchyard is small but not insignificant. Family names, whole families. But its so peaceful and beautiful and like any place you’d like to lie down and rest your head, your life. Everything. I mentally record the names, and they are not Irish names, well, some, but not all.

There’s a row of Junipers at the edge of he churchyard. Vibrant, green, tall junipers, and in between the last few there’s a headstone. Pale and gray as you’d expect. Stained by the rain. And here’s what it said. This is all it said:

“George the beloved son of the Rev John Liddy died October 13th 1868 aged 12 years.”

For all the words a priest can muster. For every bellowing call for repentance or redemption. Pointed fingers and spit-stained cheeks of accusation. This. A heart so shrunken that he lost his words. A priest. An Irishman.

Fuck me. I get it. What more can be said? A life unlived, a boyhood suspended. A father ripped apart by grief.

The church has been abandoned for a century or more. It was St. James but you can’t see that on the map. It was a protestant church that served the immigrants that worked in an iron forge across the way. Its broken windows and treacherous slate roofs are all that remain to guard over a churchyard of forgotten souls.

In the wind, the juniper trees dance. Green all year around, and George Liddy will never be alone.

1986: Vegas and Paul’s 45 in his Shitbox Crown Vic.

In 1984 I moved to Las Vegas because my dad got a job working in some undisclosed location in the desert. I spent my senior year of high school there. My days were spent in Clark High School on the west side of town, where we could leave campus at lunch and grab cheap pizza or Wendy’s, or whatever. Some of my friends simply got drunk in the designated smoking area. I spent my nights working at Pizza Hut up West Sahara near Valley View, I think. On weekends we’d all meet “at the top of Rainbow” meaning the westernmost part of the city and we’d park and drink and blast music.

I graduated high school in 1985 and joined the Army in 1987. In that gap I worked for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department as a cadet. This wasn’t one of those scouting things, it was a full time job handling what was supposed to be non-hazardous calls — mostly burglaries after the suspects had left the scene. Anyway, what was super cool was that the program was new, and part of it was doing in-service training with all aspects of the department: forensics, patrol, analysis, and the detective bureau. None of the career cops we worked with actually knew what to do with us. We weren’t exactly kids, but we weren’t sworn officers either.

Forensics was tough because it meant crimes scenes and autopsies. As a 17, 18 year old it was really difficult to experience. I’ve got a seriously twisted anecdote about a putrefied corpse and a date with a forensics’ specialist’s daughter afterwards, but I’ll save that. The detectives, on the other hand, were pure gold. They were all salty, all had different personalities, and none of them, zero, knew what to do with me.

My first morning assigned to the LVMPD detectives bureaus as a cadet I was assigned to a 50 or 60-something year-old detective for training. I don’t remember his name, but in my memory he looked exactly like Paul Sorvino.

My Paul was a Vietnam veteran who was edging very close to retirement. One morning we were in his assigned Metro Crown Vic on our way to breakfast. Don’t let anyone tell you anything different, in 1986, Las Vegas detectives fucking loved their breakfasts. Paul loved his at this shitty greasy spoon off of Nellis Boulevard. Now a lot has changed in Vegas over the years and I admit there’s much I’ve forgotten, and there’s much that’s changed. But 1986 Nellis was the Easternmost street in the city and it abutted Nellis Air Force base and Sunrise Mountain. It was the hickest part of Vegas at that time.

On our way to Paul’s breakfast we sat in awkward silence most of the time. I made a mental note of the torn vinyl in the car, the full ashtray, and the growing crack in the windshield. This was Metro issued, by the way, but Paul loved this car and he had the kind of weight to make sure it was always saved for him.

I think we must have been about five minutes from the diner when Paul pulled this monstrous black Colt 1911 from the holster on the belt of his overburdened waist band and placed it on the cracked vinyl seat in between us.

“If anything happens to me,” he said. “You should know how to use this. Pick it up.”

And I did. And I know you’ve heard this. Real guns are much heavier than you think they’re going to be. This was no different. Seven .45 caliber rounds in the magazine, and one in the chamber. Heavy… and real. Paul then went over the basics of the firing and reloading of the weapon while driving his shitbox Crown Vic one handed down a busy Vegas street. I followed along intently, hoping against hope that i wouldn’t find myself in some Vegas firefight where I’d have the weight of Paul’s life on my hands.

We arrived at the diner. It stank like fried eggs and cigarettes. The old woman behind the grill was thrilled to make me an English muffin with peanut butter and jelly, while Paul had is usual of steak, eggs, biscuits and gravy. His 45 was safely on his hip again, a fold of fat obscuring half of it.

I’ve since held a few handguns, and I still marvel about their weight, their purpose, but Paul’s 45 and his shitbox Crown Vic will always have a special place in my heart.

I love Small Town Weird (an introduction)

We were a bunch of drunk divorced dads hoping to reinvent ourselves. We were cops, managers, scientists, salesmen, computer geeks, and hopeless philanderers. We were the Chuck E. Cheese misfits trying always to exceed the two-beer limit at our kids’ birthday parties — shit pizza, the earsplitting screams of OPKs (Other Peoples Kids), and marathon skee ball competitions to see who could collect the most prize tickets for their urchins. It took us years to divest ourselves of the cheap plastic detritus those tickets bought.

We had found each other and we’d found music. We formed a band. Then we formed different bands. There’s a genealogical tree of the bands that each of us belonged to. We played in bars up and down from Cambridge, MA to Portland, ME, but mostly around the thirteen mile stretch that made up the New Hampshire seacoast. And it was glorious. My favorite gig was Market Square Day in Portsmouth where our kids could dance in the street in front of us. We had the Daniel Street venue, right outside the Daniel Street Bar — the then diviest joint in Portsmouth. Its denizens had been drunk since 9AM and stumbled out to greet us for our 11AM set. Our kind of people.

Things changed. Just about everyone got coupled up again — for better or worse — and along came a new brood of kids, new careers, and (for some of us) bigger bellies). Some are still playing music and some of us are literally watching the dust settle on the overpriced guitar(s) that we really never learned how to play that well. When I say “we” I mean me. Those that still play out are actually really effin’’ good. Originals or covers, they are fantastic fifty-somethings. Graying, balding, and still rocking.

Our first round of kids are adults now, some with families of their own. The second round (for those of us that went that route) are in, or approaching, the surly and stinky teenage years. For some of us, our per-capita divorce rate exceeds the national average. For some, it took a while to truly find the right fit.

What hasn’t changed is our collective love and affection for each other. This despite petty feuds, geographic distance, worldwide pandemics, and poorly chosen Yokoesque girlfriends. So we try to get together and catch up, and for most they converge on Brian and Karen’s house in Worcester, Vermont each year. There, they’re greeted by Vermont’s verdant hills, a picturesque swimming hole, Karen’s homegrown, farm raised food, and a persistent blue cloud of legal, equally homegrown, pot smoke.

Perseid Bats in Haute-Savoie

A month in France and despite the acrimony, there were times, moments, when things were absolute magic.

Sixt-Fer-à-Cheval

The French Alps are extraordinary. We were there in the summer. Verdant. The scent of earth, of leaves, of every fucking beautiful flower you can imagine.

There were cyclists everywhere. Brave, fit, mountain climbing cyclists.

I ran and hiked up and down the hills. Felt almost happy. The thoughts of her nagged at me. But without hope, we disintegrate.

I found things for the kids and I to do. Swimming at Lake Morillon, a ropes course, walks along the churning river. We found our special place. A ski slope with a view of waterfalls that emptied into the valley below. A place where they could be themselves without restrictions, recourse, or judgment. We found ourselves content.

My boy stubbed his toe playing soccer outside of the lonely wine shop at the base of the mountain. It looked bad. He cried for five minutes and then we grabbed Oranginas and ice cream from the shop, the Sherpa shop as it was called. I bought wine and pate’ and we trudged the two vertical miles up to the chalet.

Sometimes in the mornings she afforded me passion. Most mornings. By midday, disdain. I was constantly under the cloud of divorce. I took responsibility with half-hearted conviction. I thought that if I took the heat, it would be some kind of penance. It wasn’t.

But there was a night. The night of the Perseids Meteor Shower in 2015. I packed champagne. Good champagne. Waited until the sun began to set, offered a hand, a smile, no evaluations, and no expectations. She came with me.

She needed a break from the tension, needed to feel normal. We hiked up the hill road and up the trail until we found ourselves on the mountainside, the summer ski-slope where my daughter would often climb the ladders up to the dormant chair lifts. The special place.

The bats came first. Big, gliding shapes, followed by smaller, flitting, anxious objects, stirred by the heat and the breeze, and the stars.

Oh, the stars.

I don’t have the words.

There are only two places I’ve seen stars like this. The first was in the desert of Iraq. Lying on my back, rifle by my side, surrounded by sweat and fear and duty. And this night, with a woman that had fallen out of love with me.

Bright, perfect, and expansive.

But these, these stars, they raced across the sky. They competed with rocketing bats, warming champagne, and my aching motherfucking heart.

We drank champagne from the bottle. We kissed as if life would go on forever. We stared at the sky with all the hope that shooting stars can bring. And after we walked down the ski slope, the trail to the mountain road, back to the chalet — careful not to wake anyone — and crawled into bed and fell deeply to sleep.

1988 Behind the 9:30 Club

Sully insisted on including a Farfisa organ on the record. He was a fan of the Fleshtones, and I could see our band edging closer to that sound. Fleshtones vs. Reality had come out the year before, and Sully was transformed. It wasn’t my vision, and as far as I could tell, Jack, the drummer, wasn’t into it either. I wanted things to develop organically, to grow into our own sound. Still, Sully had convinced us to road-trip to the 9:30 Club in D.C. to catch the band on tour. He fronted the money for the cover charge, borrowed his roommate’s forest green Delta 88, and loaded it with malt liquor.

The Healing Monsters Anthology

We left Fayetteville at three-o-clock and didn’t stop to piss until we hit Richmond. By the time we passed through Fredericksburg, the sun hung low in the sky and the three of us were already a little rocked. We threw the empties out of the window as we drove, aiming for mailboxes and street signs.

By dusk, the lights of D.C. lit up the horizon. We had listened to Sully’s worn out Fleshtones cassette four times by then. Jack had passed out in the back seat after shouting out a fifteen minute rant on Reagan and Iran-Contra over the din of the music. Once in the city, we passed in awe at the surrealism of the Washington Monument, massive, glowing and thrust into the darkening sky.

“Fuuuuck,” was all I could manage.

Sully reached for his Fleshtones cassette and I stopped him with a deadly glare.

Parking was a pain in the ass in downtown D.C., and the broken windows and graffiti were a far cry from the Mall and its pristine monuments and museums. We tried to rouse Jack, but he was down for the count, so we cracked the windows an inch and locked the doors.

It was nine-fifteen, and Sully speed-walked to the 9:30 entrance.

“All we’ve missed is the shitty opener,” I said.

“The Pixies were once a shitty opener,” he said over his shoulder.

We got to the door and I could hear an uptempo ska-like scratch on a heavily distorted guitar. There was no organ, no telltale Fleshtones’ harmonica.

“They haven’t even gone on yet,” said Sully as he paid our cover. But I recognized the band the moment Ian Mackaye belted out the opening lyrics to “Merchandise.” I didn’t have the heart to tell Sully. This was no opening act, this was D.C.’s own Fugazi.

Read the entire story here.

Ritz-Carlton Robe

I’ll steal the robe, at potentially great peril, and bring it back to her. The embroidery, “Ritz-Carlton Riyadh,” is stitched in fine detail. No expense spared here.

My room is gilded, painstakingly appointed. I don’t know anything about thread counts, but I can imagine that more is better. The Royal Suite is more than six thousand dollars a night here, and that includes internet. I’m not in the Royal Suite, but I wonder if those Saudi royals that were imprisoned here had stayed in it.

My wife is leaving me and I don’t think the robe will change that. I’ll bring it to her anyway, out of some desperate hope that the gesture may tip the balance. They cut off limbs if you steal in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. That should mean something to her. The risk I took to bring her a Ritz-Carlton robe. Maybe I’ll bring her the slippers as well.

For all its grandeur, I still can’t get a beer here, or bacon. I’m reminded of that when the Maghrib call to prayer echoes across the city from hundreds of mosques. The dissonance makes my skin crawl. If it was one mosque, it might sound hauntingly beautiful, but from so many, it wrecks my head. I put the robe in my suitcase.

At the buffet, I fill my plate with lamb kofta, spaghetti carbonara, and lime Jello. Fuck the world. The waiter comes by and asks if I’d like a mocktail. I want to choke him out, but politely order a Coke instead. I check my phone between bites. She hasn’t called or texted since yesterday.

Yesterday, two Aramco oil refineries were hit with missiles. They’re still burning today. My wife sent a brief text to ask if I was OK. I reminded her that I was in Riyadh and over two hundred miles from those refineries. She didn’t respond. Still, her concern, perhaps perfunctory, lifted me. That’s worn off now. The elation has sunk to a pervasive ache.

Back at the room, I crawl into bed. I wonder if the thread count feels better than the cheap sheets I have in my apartment in Jeddah. It’s inconclusive. However, I’m certain that my bed at home, in the States, our bed, would top anything that the Ritz-Carlton could offer. I call her to say good night. I clumsily try to cajole her into phone sex. It annoys her.

“The fires are still burning,” I say.

“It’s late,” she says.

In the morning I stare out the window at the smog and dust. I’m dreading the Riyadh traffic and the nine hour drive back to Jeddah. I take breakfast in my room — Turkish coffee, croissant, and raspberry jam.

I shower, dress, pack, and walk to the door. I pause, go to the wardrobe and grab the slippers and put them in my suitcase. Then, for good measure, I grab the complimentary Ritz-Carlton soap, shampoo, and conditioner, and pack them as well.

I drive out of Riyadh to the wailing of a thousand mosques.

Moosey, Meatloaf, Hug

(From a YA WIP)

Lithuania of all places.

Parker wasn’t’ entirely sure he knew where Lithuania was. Somewhere near Russia, he thought.

“Is that near Russia?”

RM, his best friend, grunted something before hurling the lacrosse ball back at him at a frightening velocity.

The air was thick with an impending thunderstorm. The skies had been bright and blue fifteen minutes earlier when they’d arrived at the field. Now blue-grey clouds moved in from the west – punctuated by flashes and low-rumbles. Rain was already falling over the forest across Icebear Lake, the banks of which held the swimming and canoe docks of the camp that would be his home for the summer.

“What?” he said.

He caught the ball in his stick, twisted it, and sent it hurling back.

“What? she said.

RM, short for Rosemary, was about four inches taller than Parker, thick, athletic, and with a mane of red hair framing a face that was impossibly freckled. As usual, she was wearing a concert t-shirt, skinny jeans, and red Converse.

“Where’s Lithuania?”

She caught the ball and approached him. “Near Russia,” she said.

RM played outside linebacker for the high school football team. She was the only girl among the mob of chest-puffing, arrogant guys that played on the Holbrook High Cavaliers. They had been brutal when she joined the team, but so had she. If it was a painful initiation, she never said anything about it – no complaints, nothing. She could deal out a bruising as well as any of the boys, and many of them learned the hard way.

“Can you back out? Come with me instead?” Said Parker. “Camp won’t suck shit so bad with you there. We’ll sneak out at night and drink some brews by the lake, like we did last summer.”

RM tried to smack his junk with her lacrosse stick, but Parker dodged away last second.

“Promise me you won’t go nuts on the booze,” she said. “And there’s no way I’m not taking this opportunity. I’ll be teaching English to kids. Stuff like this looks really good on my college application.”

RM wanted to go to med school, become a neurosurgeon and there was nothing in Parker’s estimation that would prevent her from doing just that.

“I promise nothing.” He smiled. “I’ll take it easy, but I don’t plan on staying long. I figure I can get myself fired in the first week and my mom and dad will be forced to deal with me directly. It’s bad enough they’re splitting up, but sequestering me at camp while they make the ‘transition?’ I’m sure that violates every fundamental rule of parenting.”

RM grabbed him by his hair and pulled his head between her large breasts, bear hugged him.

“You’ll get through this. I know you will.” She said. “You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”

He struggled and protested in muffled complaints, then eventually wriggled loose. She did this all the time – the moosey Meatloaf support group hug from Fight Club, one of their favorite movies.

“Jesus, RM, your tits smell like Jack’s raging bile duct.”

She reached for his hair again. A flash of lightning, closer now. He dodged her. They looked to the sky.

“Gonna get shitty soon,” she said.

“It feels pretty shitty right now,” he said.

“Parker, your parents are getting a divorce, but you still have them. They’re good people going through a hard time. Life’s gonna be upside down for a bit, but then each day gets a little better, you’ll all figure out the new normal, and before you know it you’ll bragging to me about your two Christmases, and two birthdays. I love you man. We’ll get together after camp and Lithuania, share stories of our adventures, and maybe get just a little shitfaced before we have to go back to school.”

This time they gave each other a real hug.

If anyone knew anything about loss and new normals, it was RM. Her parents died in a car crash when she was nine. He’ll never forget seeing her break down at their funeral, and then – despite being a tall, husky red-headed nine-year old in a small town – build herself back up. A knot formed in his stomach when he thought about it. Her mom’s best friends, a lesbian couple adopted and raised her.

She playfully pushed him away, tossed him the lacrosse ball.

“Give this camp thing a shot. Make some new friends. Be the amazing space monkey I know you are.”

The rain was upon them now – a heavy summer rain with fat drops that stung their skin and soaked their clothes immediately. With the rain came the thunder. Great, noisy claps accompanied by angry flashes of lightning. As the sky darkened they called out hasty “byes” and ran in opposite directions towards their homes.

The Fixer and the Cups

I’m getting out of a dusty SUV in a poorly maintained parking lot in a questionable part of Riyadh. We’ve parked next to a ramshackle pickup truck with three men sleeping inside. They wake as our doors slam shut and glare at us. The lot is surrounded by crumbling walls with protruding rebar, and cluttered, trash-filled alleys and anonymous doorways. Ignacio knows where he’s going, and Scott and I follow him.

Ignacio is our expediter. He’s the company driver, but in the seven years he’s lived in Riyadh, he’s figured out how to get things done. He’s one of almost two million overseas Filipino workers in Saudi Arabia, and well-ingrained in the Filipino expat community. His compatriots occupy a vast number of administrative, retail, medical and labor positions across the country. This will be to my benefit as I go through Iqama processing.

Ignacio leads us out through a gap in the wall. He’s wearing a red checkered shirt and jeans, his skin is darkened by the Saudi sun. His expression is serious, as if he’s working equations in his head. My attempts to thank him for his help are met with polite dismissals.

“This is my job,” he says.

We’re in an alley, cars parked haphazardly throughout, people perched on thresholds — Arab, Indian, and Filipino. Someone calls out as we pass. I’m not sure if it is to us or not, but we keep moving. Ignacio opens a nondescript door and we find ourselves in a cramped office with woman in full abaya and niqab sitting at a desk behind a computer. She’s clutching a Quran and prayer beads.

“Give her your passport,” Ignacio says. “And your money.” I’m operating on autopilot, no sleep, and a seven-hour time difference. She take my passport and three hundred Riyal (about $81 USD) and inputs my information into her PC. To be honest, I’m not sure what she’s doing. She’s at it for a few minutes and then fills out a small green card and hands it back to me. Ignacio tells me it’s time to go. We’re up and out, and back into the heat of the alley.

It’s not just the heat that gets to me. The air in Riyadh is thick with dust and exhaust. It coats my nasal passages and throat. It burns and I cough and sneeze, and I’m afraid that I’m catching MERS.

We’re into another unmarked door, but this one leads us into the back entrance of a clinic. I follow Ignacio down a hallway with walls of pale blue ceramic tile. We pass through a waiting room with a long line of people snaking from a reception desk. We go through double doors and let them swing behind us. I find myself in a dimly lit room with two adjoining toilets. There’s a window in the wall, a booth of sorts. A young Filapina sits on a tall chair on the other side.

“There,” motions Ignacio.

I approach the window. The girl, in medical scrubs that match the tiles on the walls, slides two plastic cups through a slot in the window. Two cups. I knew that Saudi Arabia required a urinalysis upon arrival in the country, but what was the second cup for?

I pointed to the second cup and shrugged. The girl stared at me blankly. I turned to Ignacio.

“This cup?” I said.

“This cup?” said Ignacio.

“Yeah, this cup.”

“Oh,” said Ignacio. “That’s for your poo.”

Arboreal

My seven mile walkabout took me through these woods in Broom, Bedfordshire. Peaceful, beautiful, and almost mystical.

My Riyadh Purgatory

The King Khaled International Airport, Riyadh immigration reception area is swarming with people, glazed eyes weary in the face of an apathetic and laconic Saudi bureaucracy. There are scores of Pakistanis, Filipinos, and Africans mixed with pockets of Western businessmen and women in long lines waiting to gain entry into baggage claim. They shift from one foot to the next, place bags on the ground, pick them up, adjust hijab and abaya, and peer intently at the immigration clerks. They, like me, are waiting for this process — whatever it is supposed to be — to actually proceed.

The clerks are all young Saudi men with neatly trimmed beards. They wear crisp white thawb and red and white gutra (or “keffiyeh”) held upon their heads in a variety of rakish folds by the black corded agal. They all share the same impassive look upon their narrow, almost feminine faces. I find them striking, clean, and exotic — and determinately lazy, distracted, and inefficient. I’m watching and drawing conclusions. They routinely leave their posts, greet each other with three solid pecks on the cheek, only breaking their stoic facades to laugh and joke among themselves. They return to their posts and text on their iPhones, stare at computer screens, then readopt their cold demeanors before calling another traveler forward.

The six lines to the left of the immigration area are intended for first-time arrivals to the Kingdom. In the center are lines for diplomats and visiting businesspeople who have secured their iqama residency permits; to the right are the booths for citizens of the Gulf Cooperative Council, or GCC, which consist of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait. Despite the line distinctions, uniformed Saudis regularly shift travelers from one line to another — most of the time taking people from the back of the lines and moving them to the front. As I stand there,I watch the line behind me disappear, and the line in front of me grow.

In some cases I get it. Women and family are given preferential treatment to the throngs of single male travelers trying to get through. Only, after standing in line for three hours, I wonder if my progress will continue to be trumped by new arrivals. I’m thinking that I may never get through, that perhaps my flight had crashed and I’m really in purgatory and doomed to suffer an eternity waiting for a line to proceed forward that never will.

I become opportunistic and am punished for it. I bounce from line-to-line yet my progress remains halted. I analyze and explore the situation. I try to look at it philosophically, try to discern a lesson. I come up empty. I meet people in line, and we share our befuddlement. There’s the Detroit consultant from KPMG in a suit and sneakers who’s breaking fundamental Saudi conventions by staring at all the women in line; the French software developer who says that it’s much worse in Belgium, and then the epic biblical filmmaker who doesn’t even have a visa. None of these people are staying longer than a week. I’m staying a year. I’m here to help train the MOI. Don’t they know who I am? Did no one anticipate my arrival? I’m not just anyone.

In the end I am the absolute last member of my Air France flight to reach the immigration desk. Still, I am thrilled. The clerk takes my passport, snaps my photo and digitally scans my fingerprints. All I need is the stamp and I’m on my way. He stares at his computer screen and taps his fingers. He looks up at me and I smile and reach for my passport.

“Please have a seat,” he says.
“Is there a problem with my visa, I ask”

“No, the system is down.”

I get through only to discover that my luggage is lost