Page 2 of A Dead Man's B-Side
The CBP officer tapped the passport that’d gotten me in this situation in the first place against the edge of the table separating us with a raised brow. “Why don’t you tell me where you got this?”
I mirrored his stare long enough for him to have had enough, light flashing against his bald head, almost allowing me to see my future, as he lowered it and focused his gaze on the papers in front of him.
Allowing me a moment respite from the growing anxiety that this might be the final straw.
I forgot what I was pondering upon, but if I could withdraw further into the crevices of my mind, I’ll start somewhere.
When I was a child, my mother used to watch me in the rare moments of her consciousness. She’d stare for hours at me or through me, I never knew. But there was only one instance when I’d looked back, vowing to myself not to look away until she averted her gaze first. That was the first time she’d whispered in her broken English to herself, “I’ve birthed the Baba Yaga for my sins.”
I swore to never meet her eyes again after that.
My eyes, as I would grow up to discover, were too frozen over, death lurking behind the ice, for her liking.
Later in the years, when my curiosity and time had met on an agreeing field, I looked up what my mother failed to teach me. InRussian Fairy Talesfor Children,nestled in the back of the Chicago public library, I’d found out my mother was simply an easily manipulated young woman who never learned to hold herself accountable.
And despite these shortcomings, I found it to be rather a compliment, considering it was the only feature most important for the cards I’d been dealt.
“Are you refusing to answer? Because I can sit here all day–or better yet, we can speed this along and have you in a cell by dinner.”
The deep voice thrust me back into the present, and I did not falter in weighing my options, wondering if there’d be anyopportunity to make a break for it. Forget the manila folder in my worn-out bag and hide out in a small town before returning to the monotone life I’m used to.
It wasn’t that the information on the passport was all made up. My nameisAlexandr Miroslav, and I was born on January 9th, 1965. I am a male, I have blue eyes, brown hair, debatably true, and both of my parents were born and raised in Russia before coming to America for a ‘better life’.
Stitching truths and lies was always easier.
It wasn’t any of those things that tipped them off.
It was that the passport the rat had made for me was so horribly fabricated, they couldn’t help but notice. A passport with twenty-eight pages rather than the customary thirty-two.
No officer who touched over a hundred passports a day would possibly be able to ignore the unfamiliar weight and feel.
I really was going to kill him.
If he hadn’t already disappeared with my money, and if I made it out of here handcuffs-free.
“I don’t understand why I’m being held.” I almost didn’t recognize my own voice with its rough rasp echoing in the cold room. It wasn’t like I used it often; no one was around to talk to.
“You’re going to play dumb when your…” he made a show of looking through the pages of my passport mockingly before discarding it on the table like it was nothing but useless paper that didn’t cost me the golden egg I’d pawned. Well, it might as well have been, “passport is as fake as the bags they sell down by the river?”
I kept both hands on the table and my eyes dead set on him. I needed to get out of here fast, but looking for a way out with sharp eyes watching me only made me appear like a shifty crack addict, ready to break open at the first sign of trouble.
He heaved out a sigh that moved his entire upper body before leaning in, his eyes taking on a pitiful look. “Listen, kid… you’re young. Probably alone and dirt poor from the looks of it. But there are options for you. If you’re running from something, there’s help at the ready.”
Doubt it.
“I don’t need help.”
He raised his brow before glancing at my bag, the threads and traces of grime sticking out like sore thumbs. “Doesn’t look that way to me.”
“Thankfully, no one asked for your… professional evaluation.” I watched him take offence before he realized I wasn’t worth the frustration and shook his head.
“Fine, don’t talk. But you’re not getting on that flight.” He smiled, pleased when I glared, and glanced at the door behind him. “Neither are you slipping away to some abandoned train station for some shuteye.”
The words hadn’t fully left his lips before the door keeping me hostage opened, as if by a miracle. It was loud, I noticed, as it swung wide open with a deep groan that resonated through the small room. Another CBP officer slipped in before shuffling to the side in a robotic gesture to reveal a thin man with a side part and slickedback hair coming in behind him.
He looked to be someone with authority because it didn’t take a double-take from the man who had previously been questioning me to stand straight in haste. “Commissioner!”
Ah.
