The Illegal (7 page)

Within eight kilometres, he felt he was chasing runners he would never catch. He felt energy draining out of him. The pack of lead runners dropped him, and then the chase pack of twenty runners dropped him. After ten kilometres, he slowed to an easy pace. If he had no chance of running a fast time, it was best to save his legs for another race and take this as an easy training run. But even at a pace he could have managed as a teenager at altitude, Keita now felt ill and desperately thirsty. At water station after water station, he drank greedily and spilled water all over himself. His hamstring clamped so tightly that he had to walk up the last part of Heartbreak Hill. Keita struggled to the finish line in 2:35. He finished sixty-fifth and was the slowest of the fifteen Zantorolanders in the race.

That was it. Keita had no chance of staying in America to build his running career. Hamm would send him home. Keita would be made to disappear one night. His life would end before it had truly begun. No career, no family, no lasting creation or crowning achievement, nothing.

Anton Hamm came to see him in the race recovery area, where Keita was downing cup after cup of electrolyte drink. Keita expected that Hamm would be furious, but he was surprised to see the man appearing calm.

“Not to worry,” Hamm said, clapping his giant palm on Keita’s shoulder. “Everybody has bad races. You just need a little more time, but not in America. You need a lot less competition. You need to be in Freedom State. How busted up are you?”

“I’m okay. I had a bad day, so I took it easy. My legs will be fine.”

Hamm said that he would give Keita two weeks in Freedom State to rest and do light workouts before being tested in a fifteen-kilometre race.

T
HEY FLEW FROM
L
OGAN
A
IRPORT ON A NON-STOP, FIFTEENHOUR
trip to Freedom State. Keita sat in economy and Anton Hamm in first class, and as they exited the plane together, Hamm repeated his instructions.

“Nod and indicate that you understand, and otherwise, defer to me. I have your passport, your visa, your papers. Everything will be fine.”

They passed through three lines of security with armed guards and immigration and customs officials in uniform. The first line was there to inspect his passport, the second to inspect his visa, the third to go through his bags. At each, Anton Hamm explained that Keita Ali was an elite marathoner from Zantoroland, fresh from the Boston Marathon, come to enter races in Freedom State. Hamm said he was Keita’s manager and that he would ensure Keita obeyed all of the country’s laws, and then return him to his wife and children and his job as the groundskeeper in a tennis club in Zantoroland before the month-long visitor’s visa had expired.

Tennis club? Wife and children? All Keita had to do was nod and smile and watch his visa and passport get stamped and then go back into the pocket inside Hamm’s business suit. With that, he was allowed into the third-richest nation in the world.

Inside Clarkson International Airport, Hamm bought Keita a meal and a pack of gum and a few magazines, and then they boarded another flight for Metallurgia, three hours to the east.

I
N
M
ETALLURGIA, THE FOURTH-LARGEST CITY IN
F
REEDOM
State, Anton Hamm put Keita up in a guest house in a training
centre for runners. Keita had a clean room with its own toilet and shower. The guest house had a television, daily newspapers from around the world and rows upon rows of books. They fed him, cafeteria-style, as much as he wanted to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and they showed him the starting point for dozens of kilometres of running trails.

Keita did not dare ask any other runners lodged at the training centre how a person from Zantoroland might slip into hiding in Freedom State. But he knew that he would have to flee before his one-month visa expired, and before Hamm chose to send him back to Zantoroland. Even if Keita ran well in Freedom State, his time here was limited. To stay alive, he had only one option: to go into hiding before he was returned home.

One evening, he went into town to watch a movie and afterwards wandered into a bar. With some hesitation, he approached a black man sitting alone and asked how he could get to AfricTown, which he knew was where the Zantorolanders lived.

“Take the bus to Clarkson,” the man said in a low voice, “and when you get there, walk south on AfricTown Road and follow the people.”

“And where can I find this bus?” Keita asked.

“Three blocks down. Corner of Millard and Hadfield Streets. But be careful in AfricTown.”

“Why?”

“Police raid it, looking for Illegals. I wouldn’t go there until things settle down.”

“What do you mean?” Keita said.

“It’s never been safe to be illegal here, but since the government got elected, they’ve been deporting people as fast as they can. I don’t know what you’re running from, brother, but be careful of what you are running to.”

Keita asked where a person could hide.

“No papers?” the man asked.

“No,” Keita said.

The man said that hotels were obliged to call the police when prospective guests arrived without documentation. But some private homes and guest houses took people in—cash only and no questions asked.

“Thanks, brother,” Keita said.

“Peace.” The stranger shook his hand.

Keita hesitated, but then he could not stop himself from asking, “Could I use your phone? I need to call my sister, urgently, but she’s in the United States. I’ll pay you for it.”

“Help yourself, man. Don’t worry about the money.”

Keita called his sister, but she was still not answering and now her voice-mail box was full. A knot formed in his stomach. Would he find Charity? Was she alive? Keita handed back the phone, thanked the fellow and walked away. He had to force back his tears. He had no family with him. No friends. Not a soul who cared the least for him. It was an odd feeling to walk the streets of a country knowing that not a single person knew your name or a thing about you—or would notice if you lived or died.

A
WEEK BEFORE THE FIFTEEN-KILOMETRE TEST RACE IN
Metallurgia, Anton Hamm announced that he was leaving for a business trip out of town but would be back in time to watch. He took Keita’s passport, visa and ID with him. All Keita had was his clothes, the snacks that he had been hoarding from the dining room, the money that he had been saving (twenty dollars a day from Hamm for spending money), plus the two-thousand-dollar signing bonus.

Early the next morning, during breakfast, Keita was summoned to the office for a phone call from Hamm. He reassured Hamm that his run the day before had gone well, his legs felt fine and he was ready for the race.

After Keita hung up, he returned to his room and stuffed his clothes, five apples, four pears, three peanut butter sandwiches, two energy bars and a litre of water into his large knapsack. He shoved
his small knapsack inside it, too. He put on his running gear and laced up his shoes. Keita hid his cash in a zippered pocket inside his knapsack, but he kept a fifty-dollar bill in each of his pants pockets. Then he slipped out the door and jogged, with the knapsack pulled against his back, twelve kilometres to the Metallurgia transit station. He paid $150 in cash for a one-way ticket, and in the bathroom, he used the toilet, washed and towelled off, applied deodorant, changed into street clothes and brushed his teeth. Feeling and smelling clean and hoping he looked about as unassuming and ordinary as any black man could look in a country known for deporting every Illegal it could catch, Keita Ali boarded an intercity bus that would leave in a matter of minutes. A day-old
Clarkson Post
had been left on the seat he chose in the middle of the bus, and he made a point of looking at the sports pages because that seemed like something an ordinary Freedom Statonian would do. Perhaps the strategy worked. Nobody stopped, interrogated or looked at him. The bus left at the scheduled hour, although it was only half full at the time.

It was the strangest bus ride Keita had ever taken. There were no chickens or goats aboard. There was only one passenger per seat, and no one stood in the aisles or sat among luggage on top of the bus. As a matter of fact, they didn’t even
have
luggage on top of the bus. Keita stowed his knapsack in a space above his seat.

Not a single person sang or laughed or danced during the twenty-six-hour trip. Nobody turned on a transistor radio; in fact, no one seemed to carry one. No strangers met, argued about politics, shared a sandwich or discovered that they were distant relatives. Keita looked out the windows anxiously: Would they come up to police stations or army barracks and be halted there? Would roving bands of soldiers board the bus? There were no checkpoints along the highway, and no soldiers entered the bus to find his passport missing and wait for a bribe. Every six hours, the bus stopped at a gas station and passengers were told that they had ten minutes to get out and stretch or buy a snack. Except to relieve himself, guzzle water and refill his bottle, Keita stayed on the bus, slouched low in his seat.

Apart from the absence of human conversation, it was the most comfortable, commodious, odourless and painless bus ride in the history of mankind. At the end of the trip, which terminated at the very hour the bus schedule had predicted, Keita and forty-nine other passengers were discharged from the vehicle. He followed the others, all of whom acted as if they were complete strangers, as if they had never travelled together or eaten side by side or slept under the very same moving roof.

Keita Ali was anonymous, alone and about to go underground in Clarkson, population 4.5 million—the capital and the biggest city of Freedom State. Nobody knew him here. If something happened to him, nobody would think to notify his sister. Nobody would even know where to find her. Keita Ali could not afford to get caught. If he were deported, he would likely be executed. And then Charity would be alone. If any immigration official or police officer approached him, Keita would run for his life.

Freedom State, 2018

V
IOLA
H
ILL PASSED THE TWO-KILOMETRE MARKER
in her racing chair. She was making good time on the harbourfront boardwalk. At seven o’clock on a Wednesday morning, there were no toddlers dashing out in front of her, no grannies standing in the middle of the path, no oblivious smokers and no dogs off-leash as Viola wheeled at sixteen kilometres an hour. The sun was coming up. To Viola’s right, it struck the waters of Ten-Mile Inlet at a low angle, and to her left, it washed the white stones of the government buildings in soft light. Viola would do a U-turn at the commercial harbour and get back home in time to shower, eat and make it to her shift at the paper. Viola liked to arrive early. Always.

Viola had a cellphone strapped to her arm and plugged into her earbuds. Mick Jagger was getting no satisfaction. Damn right. Viola had been trying for two years to get off the sports page, and she couldn’t get any satisfaction either.

Viola had nothing against sports. She liked to work out, and she liked the burn in her biceps, triceps and deltoids when she wheeled three mornings a week. Yes, she liked sports, but she wanted to
write
about news. She wanted people to look for her stories and read them, without knowing or caring that she was blagaybulled—black, gay and disabled—and proud of it. “Blagaybulled” was Viola’s own word, and she wanted her words to fly without being weighed down by her identity. In sports, she could not escape it. Every team manager,
athlete and sports reader knew her. And she knew them. She knew which ones were thinking,
Here comes that bigmouth in the wheelchair.

She was strong. And fast. Viola easily overtook walkers and joggers on the boardwalk. So it surprised her when a runner came up from behind and shot past her. This was no jogger. This man was flying. Slim, fit and running faster than 3:30 per kilometre but not even looking like he was working. Black. Short, tightly cropped hair. Medium height. He wasn’t wearing long, loose, baggy shorts that hung almost all the way to the knees. No sir, this man had proper marathon shorts, slit up the side of the thighs. His hamstrings were as well defined as rope, and his calves bulged like rocks. He lifted off the balls of his feet as he entered his stride and spent more time airborne than on the ground. Viola enjoyed the view of his working backside until he disappeared around a bend, and then she wheeled faster to bring him back into sight. As she rounded the bend, only a kilometre from the end of the boardwalk and the piers by the commercial harbour, where the multicoloured containers were lifted on and off the decks of the huge ships, the runner was coming back her way. At the same time that she saw him—mid-twenties, baby face, clean-shaven—she heard the sirens.

The runner said, “I’d turn back, if I were you.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Mob, up ahead.” And then he was gone.

Viola kept wheeling onward. If there was a mob, that’s where she would head—and quicker than before. She tilted forward into a racing position and pumped harder with her arms, catching the wheels with her gloved hands and pushing down to accelerate. What were the sirens for, and where was this mob? There. Where the boardwalk ended, up ahead. Five police cruisers, two paddy wagons and a handful of Freedom State Immigration Enforcement vehicles were parked helter-skelter in a lot. There was a boat at the wharf. About ten metres long. Chipped paint. The
Voyager
. Rough shape. But the boat wasn’t as shabby as the small crowd of black people on deck. One by one, they were being led stumbling over a gangplank
and onto the pier, where they were handcuffed by a police officer and led to the paddy wagon.

Viola wheeled up to the pier. “Excuse me,” she called up to an immigration enforcement official. “Excuse me. What’s going on here?”

He ignored her.

“Hey, buddy, what’s going on?” she said.

“Beat it,” he said.

Viola removed the phone from the strap on her shoulder and began filming. All those leaving the boat were black. Mostly men. All thin.

The immigration official turned to face her directly. “I said beat it.”

“I’m with the
Telegram
,” she said.

“And I’m Barack Obama,” he said. The man was as white as paste.

She wheeled past him, right up to the police paddy wagon into which the refugees were being shoved. She saw five men and a woman in there and took a picture with her cellphone.

A man was led in handcuffs right past her.

“Sir,” she said, “I’m with the
Clarkson Evening Telegram
. Who are you, and why are you being arrested?”

He was about twenty-five years old and bleeding from a cut above his eye.

“Did someone hit you?” Viola asked.

The man took a look at the officer leading him, and said, “No, I just bumped my head.”

“Where are you from?”

“No talking to media,” the police officer said.

“There is no law that says you can’t talk to the media,” Viola said. She tried again. “Where are you from?”

“Zantoroland,” the man said. The officer rushed him into the paddy wagon.

“You, ma’am,” Viola said to a woman. She was about twenty, walking with a pronounced limp and carrying a bundle of rags in her arms. “Why is this happening?”

“Three weeks on that boat,” the woman said. “No toilet, bad water, food rations. Now I can’t wake my baby.”

“What’s your name?”

“Dolores Williams. Can someone help my baby?”

Viola looked around. “I’ll see if I can find someone.”

“Bless you! And tell my sister I made it. Loretta Williams, in Yagwa City.”

A police constable standing on the far side of the paddy wagon appeared to be telling people what to do. Viola wheeled over to him.

“A woman over there can’t wake her baby.”

“She’ll have to wait.”

“But the baby could be dying!” Viola said.

“Not my concern.”

“I work for a national news outlet and you are telling me that you don’t care if a baby is dying?”

“If you weren’t way down in that contraption, I’d smack you and arrest you for disturbing the peace. Beat it, before I get angry.”

Viola aimed her phone at him. If he did something stupid, she would catch it on video.

“Viola Hill, reporter with the
Clarkson Evening Telegram
, and I’m simply asking you where you are taking these men and women—and why.”

The constable started walking away.

“I’m going to call 911 if you don’t go see that baby!”

“Christ almighty,” he said. “Where’s the damn baby?”

Viola pointed to the mother, and the constable walked her way.

Suddenly, cars began streaming into the parking lot by the wharf. Men and women, all white, mostly over forty, gathered at the pier. There were about a dozen of them, three with placards: “Enough Is Enough,” “Send ’Em Back” and “Who Invited Them?”

Viola took photos of the placards. Then she wheeled up to the demonstrators.

“Sir,” she said to one, “I’m Viola Hill with the
Clarkson Evening Telegram
. Can you tell me why you are here?”

“Who are you?”

“I just told you who I am. Who are you?”

“We’re with SIB.”

“SIB?”

“Send Illegals Back.”

“Who told you that these people were being arrested?” Viola asked.

“We scan the police radios. Our country is wasting good resources detaining this scum. Should have turned the boat around and sent it back home.”

“What is your name?”

“Don.”

“Last name?”

“None of your business.”

“If you turned this boat around, those people would die.”

“Is that our problem? We didn’t invite them to Freedom State. Our country is not a house without a door. They can’t just keep crashing into it with no passport, no documentation, no legal right to be here.”

“Why, exactly, are you so worked up about refugees? A mother who was just arrested is worried about whether her baby is still alive.”

“And why are you such a bleeding heart? How do I even know you’re a journalist? You don’t look like a journalist. Do you have ID? How do I know that you’re not a refugee too?”

“Just tell me what your problem is with the refugees. So readers will understand.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, our country is going down the drain. We’re supposed to be a wealthy nation. But we have violence, unemployment, dropping exports and then the whole black market system in AfricTown is draining our economy. It costs thousands of dollars to detain, clothe and feed an Illegal for a year. Take ’em out of prisons and send ’em back to where they came from, and bulldoze AfricTown while you’re at it.”

There was a break in the parade of people, and Viola saw one man lift his hands up and away from the officer arresting him.

“I will go peacefully,” the man said. “But no handcuffs. I’m no criminal!”

Two police officers began beating him with billy clubs. He crumpled to the ground. When they stopped, he offered his wrists.

The protestor named Don yelled, “Are you ready? Not so cocky now, eh?”

“Sir,” Viola asked the refugee, “what is your name?”

“Desmond Torrance,” he mumbled.

“Why did you make the trip?”

“My days were numbered. I took my chances.”

The police constable came to stand in front of her, blocking Viola’s view of Torrance.

“Listen, girlfriend,” he said sarcastically, “back off.”

“I’m a reporter with the—”

“I don’t give a shit who you say you are. You’re impeding police business.”

One of the demonstrators with a placard shouted, “Arrest the bitch. Send ’em all back home.”

Viola looked at the constable. “What about the demonstrators? Are you asking
them
to leave?”

“Last warning,” the cop said.

Viola turned, retreated ten metres, and spun her chair around once more to face the cop. “Satisfied?”

“I’m warning you to stay out of the way. No communicating with the criminals.”

“Criminals?”

“None of them have permission to enter Freedom State. This makes them Illegals, which makes them criminals.”

Viola did a head count. Fifty people arrested: thirty men, ten women, eight children and two babies. None of them looked like they had showered, eaten properly or slept in weeks.

The police officer slammed the paddy wagon doors. “Before I lock up, there’s room for one more,” he said to Viola.

“I’m going, I’m going,” she said to the constable. “But what’s your name?”

“It’s on my badge,” he said.

Constable Devlin James
.

“Where are these people to be detained?”

“Same place we put any other criminals. The City Jail.”

V
IOLA SKIPPED A SHOWER AND MADE IT TO THE NEWSROOM
in time to write and file the story and to send in the photos she had taken, before beginning her shift for the sports department.

Mike Bolton, the city news editor who had resisted every non-sports story she had pitched, called her to his desk.

“Viola, what’s your beat?”

“I assume that is a rhetorical question,” she said.

“Did anyone ask you to leave the world of sports and file a story about a routine arrest of no consequence?”

“It was on my own time,” Viola said. “And it’s not routine.”

“We have refugees being arrested—off boats or in AfricTown—every week.”

“This story—”

Bolton put up his hand. “Stop. Just stop. Next time you have the grand idea to try your hand at writing news, how about going through me first? I have no room in the paper for this story.”

“Bolton, your head is up your ass.”

“Keep talking. I could have you disciplined for insubordination.”

“You wouldn’t know a news story if it yanked the pillow out from under your head.”

“I am the city news editor! And you’re a—”

“What am I, Bolton? Go on. Say it.”

“A sports reporter.”