recommended listening: american idiot, by green day
A couple days later, I’m balancing accounts and going over registration when the phone rings and a surprisingly and someone with surprisingly bad speech in the local language asks to speak to me.
I respond in English, and the local language turns to Texan: “Uh, yeah, well, I was uh wondering if you could come in to the Embassy for a visit. Be sure to say you’re here to see _____.”
Apparently, news of the unexpected lab had traveled.
Twenty minutes later, I arrive.
“I’m here to see _____.”
The guard looks at my passport, and waves me to the front of the line, bypassing the normal place where you stand wondering if someone’s going to shoot you.
“Yes Sir. Go right ahead, sir. Welcome, sir.”
Sir? I teach grammar for a living. Embassy people don’t call me ‘sir.’
“Sir, you need to see _____? Well, yes sir. Please step through here, sir. Any electronic devices? No? Very good, sir. Please leave your watch with me, sir. No cell phones or flash drives? Very good, sir? Just walk across the yard, through the door, through the security point, and enter the room on the left.”
I walk through unescorted.
“Very good, sir, we were expecting you. Please sit here for one minute, and then go around the corner and enter the small room.”
I go around the corner, but there is no small room, only a large waiting room for people wanting to immigrate to the U.S. There’s a service window on the right, but privacy cubicles prevent you from seeing anyone on the other side of the service window unless you’re directly in front of them.
Then I hear my name, with rising intonation, coming from…How do you respond to a voice that comes from the air directly above you?
I look around. My name is repeated. People look up from their forms and stare at me.
Yep, the woman’s voice from the air is saying my name a third time.
I look up slightly, and speak in a voice that I hope will be audible only to the unseen speaker. “I hear you. What do you want me to do?”
“Sir, please come to the first cubicle.”
I go, and find the same woman who had told me to walk around the corner and enter the little room.
“Sir, you missed the little room. It’s that door back there.”
The broom closet?
I open the unmarked door and enter the unlit room. The far wall is glass, and a young man stands behind it in a lighted room. “You forgot to turn on the light in the little room,” the man is stage-whispering to someone on his side of the glass, “I only see my reflection. He can see me!”
“Do you want me to turn on the light?” I ask.
The young man nods slightly. I turn it on, and am now looking at my own reflection in the glass.
“Thank you. OK, can I see some ID? OK. Great. Great. OK, wait here for two minutes. Then go out, turn right, and walk through the door at the far end of the hall. It says it’s a fire door, emergency exit, or something like that, but just walk through. Someone will meet you on the other side to guide you through the next check point to your next guide.”
Seriously? The theme from Get Smart! plays through my mind as I walk down the hall.
I find myself passed off to another guide, and another, and then back to the one of the previous ones, who says, after meeting me less than three minutes before, “Oh, I didn’t know it would be you. OK, follow me.”
Through another key-coded door into a lavishly marbeled lobby and up a curving marble staircase.
“Feels like a piece of home, doesn’t it?” the guide asks.
“Which white-collar prison did you grow up in?”
Then I enter The Room.
One man stands and introduces himself. “Unusual weather we’re having, isn’t it?” He shakes my hand, gives me his card, and doesn’t sit until I do. The other man just sits.
They ask me to tell the story of our move to the new location.
They ask me to tell the story of the discovery of the laboratory.
Did I recognize any chemicals? Some yellow and some white.
Was anything suspicious? When everything’s strange, it’s hard to tell if something’s suspicious.
Did studying English grammar enable me to determine from a fifteen-second tour whether the laboratory was being used to create any sort of weapon? No.
The men are respectful. Friendly, even, or trying to be. At the end of the interview, one even asked where I live and whether I like a certain restaurant. I think he was trying too hard.
But the other man never says his name. Why not? If I were a LeCarre character, better questions would be going through my mind right now, but I’m not, and there is only one: what kind of meeting involves one man who shakes your hand, gives you his card, and tells you his name, and another man who only sits? The Man Who Doesn’t Say His Name… Come on. Do people like that really exist? And if they do, wouldn’t they cover their identity more effectively by saying some name? I forget names, but they don’t forget customs. I will remember The Man Who Doesn’t Say His Name.
The next morning, a window is missing. To be specific, the entire three-by-three-foot piece of glass on one of the few un-barred windows on the ninth floor of the English school was removed from its casing and placed on the floor without a chip or a crack. None of the employees, including the all-night security guard, saw it happen. If the American community funded this little global-village assistance, thank you for not breaking the glass, and thank you for doing it when the weather was nice.
