Catch, Release

THE NEW ARRIVAL “They think it is impossible,” she tells him, “but here is what you do. You pay a man to take your picture and make you a passport; you pay another man for stamping the passport book and yet another for a paper ticket, a sheaf of pages listing multiple destinations . You make friends with a white family. You carry their bags, discreetly hustle their little ones. You pray with them. You take a chance on a foreign god. “It will not be easy,” Frances Okonjo says, “but it won’t be too difficult either. Simply move as if you were intended to move. Be as you were intended. Someone is waiting for you. Don’t doubt it. Pick up your own bag (just one, neat but inexpensive), and carry it aboard. Sleep. Eat. Practice the niceties of language: please, thank you, excuse me. You are neat. You don’t smell bad. You smell quite nice, actually. If you need to be attentive, be subtle. No googly eyes. Stay easy.” Frances Okonjo reminds him that he is not a criminal; he is a kind of refugee. A deserving refugee, one with nearly a university degree in historical geography and many useful talents. He can build anything out of nothing; he is a wizard with an oxyacetylene torch; he can bake pastry; he knows how to read weather; his touch can ease a baby’s cries. “Not only that,” she says, damp-eyed with admiration, “you are bearing the ultimate gift.” The city he leaves is made of red dust. It disappears behind him as if the wind generated by the taxi Frances arranged has blown it away. The city’s airport, on the edge of nowhere, is nothing more than a series of corrugated metal sheds. Passengers can’t observe the planes Catch, Release arriving or departing but must depend on a garbled public address system, the shaking of the building as a plane lands nearby, and a complicated system of shared body language, their own instincts. At some point he picks up his bag and shuffles into a line. His ticket is taken by a man with heavy glasses and a slightly soiled uniform that smells strongly of body sweat. The man worries the ticket around in his hands—back and forth—until his need becomes clear, and Frances ’s words are recalled: put some of your money, just a little, in a separate pocket. Peel the bills off that bundle. Some will ask; others will simply wait, and you must step in and offer. Fumbling, he manages , and finally a stub is torn off his ticket and returned to him, and then he’s out on the tarmac, staggering up a metal flight of stairs against a chapping wind, bending sideways into a narrow aisle. The woman next to him—thin, bespectacled, in an ill-fitting blue suit—falls asleep the moment she sits down. He buckles her seat belt for her. When the plane lands he climbs over her, smoothing her skirt discreetly as he passes, and retrieves his bag. She is still sleeping when he leaves, the plane emptying around her. The next airport is a mob scene wherein he is one of many thousands . Signs flash around him; unintelligible announcements are made relentlessly. He shows his ticket and his new passport to a fat woman in a uniform, and wordlessly she jabs at a number written on the page and points him toward a steel tunnel with many small waiting rooms branching off it. At his number, he pauses and finally recognizes the name of his final destination. Rain pours down outside, but like a child he presses himself against the glass until he can see the big jets taking off and landing. Abruptly he remembers his lessons and sits down with his book to wait. No thrillers, Frances instructed, no mysteries (why was he so interested in plotting?). She also nixed his cookbooks (why was he so interested in concoctions?) and his geography texts (why did he need to know [23.137.249.165] Project MUSE (2024-11-21 23:13 GMT) The New Arrival so much about places he had—supposedly—never been?). Even his mother’s Bible was rejected (nothing is more suspicious than conspicuous faith). She rooted around in his stacks of books, each one a treasure to him, and, after discarding one after another, finally approved a volume, handing it to him with a closed smile, a tight...