Immigrants

BA Flight 48 landed about an hour late yesterday, and I headed into the passport check queues without a care, as last year’s interview had been about 20 seconds long, with that officer concerned mostly with whether I had proof of a booked flight back to the States in case my adventure went south. This year a different officer left with my passport for a discussion with the nice folks in the darkened glass booth at the center of the room. She came back with two more of her official kind, one of whom served me with a paper that said I was liable to be examined further. Something of an understatement, that; for the better part of the next six hours I was the guest of Her Majesty, and this time no tea was on offer.

Mrs Shah – who informed me that they were going to find out “the real reason for my visit” – escorted me to the customs line, and in the presence of a few hundred passing travellers minutely inspeced my luggage, saving aside anything that might provide a clue, including but not limited to my notebooks, debit cards, business cards, receipts, and pretty much anything made of paper with ink on it. She kept up a running interrogation during this, but didn’t write anything down. She was polite in a meaningless, by-rote sort of way that did nothing to reassure me. I tried to like her and failed.

My luggage repacked I was taken behind several layers of closed doors, where I turned out my pockets for the uniformed officer with the electronic wand, and suffered the sour gaze of the evidently senior bloke in the suit who I feared might be in charge of my eventual fate. I was then escorted into the detention area to get acquainted with my fellow suspicious travellers from Nigeria, India, Mexico, China, and Canada (I always thought there was something off about those guys). The two Nigerians, the Indian, the Canadian, and I spoke English. The three Mexicans spoke only Spanish, but the Canadian, the Indian, and I had enough of that language to communicate with them in a very limited fashion. The Chinese bloke didn’t speak a word in any language while I was there. He slept a lot. One side of the room was windows, so we could be observed by Immigrations officers walking past, and there were three 360-degree cameras in the room being monitored from a desk outside so we didn’t get up to anything. In one corner was a little TV tuned to inane cartoon programmes, which we soon began to suspect was some kind of torturous softening-up scheme.

After perhaps an hour, Mrs Shah returned and led me into an office at the other end of our little goldfish bowl, where she filled out forms and took my fingerprints. Apparently I have very unusual fingerprints (remind me to avoid a life of crime), as the computer kept rejecting them. “Finger not recognized” is the error she got at least 40 times before she could convince it to bypass the last print and send the result to my official dossier, which will be on file with the Home Office for ten years.

Now you might be curious how I was doing at this point, and the answer is I was focussed on my outcome for the whole mess, which was the feeling of slipping between clean white sheets in my hotel room that evening, happy the whole thing was over. Every time I felt like I’d stepped into a large royal cowpat I’d replay the image of that bed and the feel of those sheets. I aimed myself at that bed in my imagination. I didn’t know where I might go before the getting-into-bed part, but I wasn’t accepting the notion of any less perfect outcome. So I was actually not doing too badly. Meanwhile the Indian man would get up every hour or so and say “I’m getting out of here. Who’s coming with me?” Then we’d laugh, and he’d laugh and sit down again. He sang to us a lot. The Canadian, who was apparently being sent back to Canada, complained loudly and profanely, but he was laughing, too. The Mexican family, which included a mother, a grandmother, and a boy of seven or eight, were mostly confused. They had come to visit relatives for two weeks and had no idea why they were there, en prison. “Vivimos aqui ahora,” I told them, and we all had a laugh at that too, though it may have been a bit on the nervous side.

Late in the afternoon yet another Immigrations officer came in to do the real interview. His name was Chris, and he was the first British person I’d seen since stepping out of the queue at 1300 who seemed genuinely interested in whether I stayed or was summarily shuffled onto the next flight back to Seattle. We spoke for perhaps half an hour, and he wrote down everything I said. Then he went to talk to his superior and much later came back and said I’d be “allowed to land.” Heck, I thought I’d landed five hours ago, but apparently I’d been circling the whole time. My arms were really tired. “I’m going over the wall,” I told my cellmates when I came back to the detention area. They all seemed happy for me with the possible exception of the Chinese man, who was glued to the cartoons.

The last wait was for the paperwork that would allow me to sign myself out the door and out of Heathrow and into a cab, and finally into those white sheets. But first I walked myself down to the Tesco on Queensway for a long-delayed supper of bread and cheese and fruit. On the way back to my hotel a low-slung quarter moon in the crook of a barren elm in Princes Square reminded me that it was all still perfect: the universe, London, and everything. Just perfect.