01.28.25. This story is a work of fiction and does not include any biographical components. I wrote the story last week, after waking from an unpleasant dream in which I could not get through customs in our next country.
The room in the immigration building is spacious and clean. An air conditioner drones in the window. It is losing to the Caribbean heat; a warm room is the best it can do. The guidebook said Grenada is sweltering in the summer. It is. The island is only twelve degrees from the Equator, only a hundred miles north of the South American coast. The heat is bearable in the breeze. Impossible without.
A floor fan shuffles the air in the room. It is yellowing from rust seeping through the white paint but quiet, only a gentle whir every few revolutions. A rhythmic metronome of bureaucracy. Only I and a customs officer are inside.
“Where did you come from?” The customs officer looks through my passport, leafs through the empty pages. Not one has a customs stamp from another country, and he does not like it.
This could be trouble. I have no food left on board, and barely any water. And I do not have anywhere to go. Trinidad? I know nothing about that place. I know very little about this one too.
“Romania,” I say. “From Romania.”
He walks to the world map on his wall. He is sexy in his immigration uniform, in tight pants that show off his fit ass. White shirt collar against the black skin of his neck. He has my life in his hands.
“You sailed from the Black Sea?” He is about to laugh. Of course, who would do that? Not through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. Not in my thirty-two-foot junker. He sees my boat through the window, anchored outside. He knows it cannot be done.
“No, no. Greece,” I say. My English is halting. I am fluent, but not when I am nervous.
Suspicion in his eyes. Greece is closer than Romania, but only by three hundred miles. It is nothing on the scale of thousands across the Atlantic Ocean from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. Yeah, no way. But that is what I have done. That’s what a person can do when they run from death.
I nod. “Yes, sir. I had good luck.”
He walks back to the map and runs his finger from Greece, across the Mediterranean Sea, past Gibraltar, then south along the African coast to the Canary Islands, then in a big swoop across the Atlantic Ocean to a tiny dot of Grenada.
“Yeah, like this?” he asks.
“Yeah. But…” I move my finger to mimic him drawing my course, then spin the finger in circles. “No wind. Then, bad wind. Then, no wind. One hundred and five days.” I say. I think extra details make things more true. They are true. One hundred and five days.
“I need to see your Zarpe?” He waits for me. I just stare. “Your departure clearance record from the previous port?”
I know what Zarpe is. But I could not get it in Greece. They were looking for me there, the organs of the government from my old country, the one that did not want me, but would not let me leave either. Their henchmen were looking for those like me who left the war, and tracked across Ukraine to cross the border into Romania, or somewhere else. But I won’t say that.
“I could not get Zarpe in Greece. The customs were on holiday. I had to leave when the weather window looked good.” My English is back, and I am fluent again. Four years at Penn State, fifteen years ago. “Sorry. Is it a big problem?”
“I can’t let you in without a Zarpe.”
“Can I pay a fine?”
“A fine?”
“I have Euros.”
He looks around. “I hope you don’t mean what I think you mean.” He looks around again. But no one is there. He does not say anymore.
I take it as a hopeful sign. I shrug.
“Does not work like this here,” he says. “I need to know where you came from,” he shrugs, pushes back my passport. But without an entry stamp I can’t stay. I press my hand on the passport, arrest its slide, and push it back. My eyes ask for mercy.
“I need a place for a few weeks before I go on.” My voice cracks.
His eyes narrow. He opens the passport again. It is a fake, but the best there is. He could not possibly know, could not know I am not from Romania.
“What is your plan?” He asks.
“I was going to wait out the hurricane season here, then sail to Panama in December, in six months. Then go to the Philippines.”
“In this?” He points outside. I nod. He shakes his head. “I need to know where you came from.”
We stare at each other then I lower my eyes. I chose to lose this contest. He has my life in his hands.
I hate this helplessness. Others crushed my plans, threw me into the inferno of war, left me with nothing but anger. I have nowhere to go but far away from Europe. Away. Away. My country does not want me because I like to fuck men. My parents don’t want to know me because I fuck men. Either would be happy if I died in their war. As long as I fight it. They want me back to fight it.
Helplessness. But I, too, have his life in my hands. I can take it with indifference; I learned after Petr and Andrey died next to me in the trench. No more pushing me around. I’ll end him. It is funny to me that he does not know it. There is a stapler. It would work.
The man turns toward his desk phone. I touch the stapler and slide it closer. He touches the phone. I swallow. I wait for him to commit. Then I think of the tracker.
“Hold on!” I yell. He startles and straightens.
I pull out a small Garmin InReach unit from my pocket. It is a satellite tracker. I brought it on board as a backup to the cheap chart plotter for navigation. And to send messages to my sister. She is the only one who cares to receive them.
“I turned it on every few days,” I tell him. “There should be a breadcrumb trail.”
He nodes. I write the Internet address to the tracking site. The unit is not connected to my name, but it came from my pocket. It should be enough.
The customs man sits down, facing his aged desktop, sideways to me. He purses his lips and types in the address. He is slow and hits the backspace a lot. The address takes him nowhere. He murmurs. Looks at me and makes a move to stand up.
I look at him. He is young, and I feel sad that such a young life could end because of a stamp for silly rules. I want to laugh. So irrational. Then, I want to plead and cry. Then, I find equilibrium in emptiness. That’s how it is now, a rare tsunami of emotions, but mostly none at all, my humanity silenced by groans of the wounded friends or foes. Who knows who? They all sound the same at night over the brim of the trench. A year of listening to that noise.
The customs man sees an error and types again. He has no keyboard skills. He is an enigma in the keyboard world. He hits enter and looks at the breadcrumb trail emerging on the screen. It extends in a broken line from Greece to Grenada.
Each point on the map is a memory. The gaps are memories too. The thunderstorms near Gibraltar. The near collision with the freighter in the channel into the Atlantic. The high seas by the Canary Islands, the terrifying nights on the swell in a screaming wind. Weeks of boredom in the meandering cloud of points near the calm of the Equator. It was stupid to go that far south.
The customs man studies me. “Insane,” he says. And he laughs. “What were you running from?”.
He does not need to know. “I want to sail to the Philippines. It is a dream.” I say.
He shakes his head. He picks up a stamp, flips it and looks at the numbers. He rolls a dial with his finger. Opens my passport on a random page and pushes the top down. The stamp clicks. He writes the number sixty inside the fresh box printed in my passport.
“I can only give you a sixty-day visa. Rules. Then you have to go to Trinidad. Then you come back. When you are ready to leave you have to check out with me. Only me, or there will be trouble. I am here Tuesdays and Thursdays in the afternoon. See only me.”
He closes the passport and is about to hand it to me. But he stops.
Tears well up in my eyes. I fight to stop them. “Sorry. I am exhausted. I spent a long time at sea. I could not imagine going out again today.”
I tell him that. Then I exhale slowly and grin. He nods, and the corners of his mouth twitch upwards and his eyes soften. He basks in his act of kindness.
How would it feel, a kindness towards another? Soon, I will know, I decide. Today is the beginning of my next life. Life in sixty-day increments marked by the sixty-day customs entry stamps. This country, then the next. I greet the stability of such timespans. He would not understand. What stability is that? But it is an infinity of certainty after a life in the trenches where the hopes never extend beyond the next day.
He thrust the passport at me. I take it, and I nod. He nods and sits down. I lean over and push the stapler away. It is time to silence my anger.
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