Escape from LA
Madeline Ashby
Inner space
Iron curtains are being rung down all over the planet – and Madeline Ashby ’s passport is missing
A quarter to eleven pm Pacific Time on 12 September 2012: my wallet has been stolen. I realise this because I have also lost the key to my hotel room, and the woman behind the black granite counter at the Intercontinental San Francisco has asked me for photo ID. And I have none. The wallet contains my passport, credit cards and, most importantly, my Canadian Permanent Residency card. The shiny new white one I got just for this trip. The single piece of photo ID that guarantees my right to return home to Toronto.
In this moment, everything I have feared most for the past six years comes to pass.
S ix years ago I was 22. I was in love with a Canadian. We watched the same anime. We rescued a cat. We talked marriage. We had dated for two years, and lived together for eight months, when in January of 2006 he received a job offer in his hometown of Toronto. He took it, and I followed. Our plan was for me to stay with him for the six months Americans are allowed to remain in Canada without a visa, so we could continue the relationship and see where it was headed. But at the Lansdowne border crossing, I was accused of immigrating illegally.
From a back office, a tall, broad man with hair the colour of German mustard came and stood at the desk. He said nothing to me. He conferred with a much shorter female agent, nodded once, then looked at my documents. “Why are you coming to Canada?”
“I’m living with my boyfriend.”
He retrieved a yellow slip and pushed it across the desk. “Sign that.”
I examined the document. Written in legalese, it seemed to say in flowery terms that I intended to spend some time in Canada. In that regard, it was accurate. I signed it, and he took it from me. “By signing this document, you’ve indicated to me your intention to enter Canada for the purposes of immigration,” he said. “As such, I cannot permit you to enter the country now or at any time in the near future. You’ll have to go back to the American side of the border.”
I lost my shit. I cried. I had what might be called a panic attack. I spent the night in Syracuse, while my boyfriend started his new job. Then I spent the next ten days in Seattle, trying to enter Toronto. When I finally did, it was after an hour in secondary screening, pleading with an agent who asked about the strength of my relationship.
“How can I know how strong it is if you won’t let me in long enough to find out?”
Three months later, we were married.
A year and a half after that, I earned my permanent residency card. I was one of 5152 spouses to do so that year. By then I had learnt to think of Canadian immigration as something like God: a faceless void with the occasional appearance of agency, whose seeming generosity might simply be benign neglect. It came after a blood test, a urine sample, an X-ray, questions about whether I was pregnant, and questions about every student organisation I’d ever joined. It came after parts of my application were lost, then found, then compared with my new documents and questioned. “Someone in Alberta doesn’t like you very much,” my attorney told me. A former Canada Border Services Agency agent once told me that failed cops tended to gravitate toward border services. When I tried to include that detail in my foresight thesis on the subject, my secondary advisor – who trains future agents – said I was being “too negative” and wouldn’t sign off on my thesis.
I thought that when I held my Record of Landing in my hands, I’d finally feel safe. Happy. Finished. I thought I’d cry tears of joy. Instead I sat silently across from my husband in a shopping mall and ate a hamburger. I had achieved my goal. But I had done so at the cost of my self-respect.
L ike all things Canadian, Permanent Resident cards are also called “Maple Leaf cards”. There is in fact a maple leaf on them, so I suppose that makes sense. They also carry the seal of the government of Canada, but try telling that to the barkeep at the Air Canada Centre, where the other Maple Leafs play. Never mind that the card has the seal, a photo, a birthday and a signature. “We don’t accept that form of ID,” I was told.
Maybe it was because the PR cards were so new. They were only a requirement for international travel starting in 2003, a year after the new Immigration and Refugee Protection Act passed. Previously, permanent residents were required to apply for “returning permanent resident” permits before leaving Canada. Without them, they risked being refused re-entry.
The old permits didn’t have RFID chips, though. So, like all forms of government-issued identification, they changed after 9/11. Now your whole record floats on the surface of your card. It is as vulnerable to skimjobs as a credit or debit card. Perhaps for this reason, a nurse taking my blood in 2010 told me to stop carrying it with me.
“But it’s my primary ID,” I said. “It’s the best proof of who I am and why I’m here.”
“Exactly,” she said. “If you lose it, you’ll lose everything.”
M y dad is a regional sales rep for Sony and Panasonic’s surveillance systems. He’s designed systems for the Gates Foundation headquarters, Tacoma’s Hilltop Neighbourhood, and the Diablo Dam. When he started, he sold A/V equipment retail. Now he spends a week in Vegas every year, talking to people about computer vision and video-motion filters.
Growing up, I maintained an enhanced sense of being surveilled at all times. We had demo black domes in our garage, perched between the firewood and the Mason jars. Boxes of promotional literature vied for prominence with the detergent in our laundry room. Whenever we were out, he pointed out to me how and where I was being watched, and speculated on how many of the domes we saw were dummies. He even bid on the contract for my high school’s security system. To this day, I’m still just the tiniest bit glad he didn’t win it. It would have been creepy for my dad to have the default logins to my school’s cameras.
For my work with the Border Town Design Studio in the summer of 2011, I asked him about the cameras installed at border crossings. He said that Sony was the only company with a total solution to the problem of security: surveillance, storage, card access, analytics. It was easier for his clients to purchase a package for these things, just like bundling a mobile data plan with internet service and cable. There was the Sony SNCCH280, with algorithms that can tell the differences in motion between a human crossing a road, a dog marking territory, and a tree blowing in the wind. There was the XI wide-area monitoring system, that can see for miles through rain and fog and snow. These systems are so complex that Sony hosts tutorials for programming them on YouTube .
That’s for the American border, though, where between 1998 and 2009, over 4000 people have died . Most of them die on the southern border with Mexico, while on the trail north. They die on trucks, or in tunnels, or under the open sky. They die of exposure and dehydration. They die when the polleros fuck up, or when they don’t pay the Sinaloa cartel for the right to cross. It’s a war out there. That’s what a volunteer from No More Deaths told me. Thanks to a 1995 strategic plan the current configuration of border checkpoints leaves the widest unpatrolled gaps in the Sonora desert. California and Texas have sewn up their borders; Arizona relies on geography to do the job. There’s a fence in Nogales, a line of black steel spiking up from the green hills like a dog’s raised hackles, but the desert is empty save for skeletal remains. USCBPA doesn’t count those remains against their mortality statistics. Last year, 177 were discovered.
Whenever someone asks me if I do strategic planning, I think of that configuration. I wonder if the planners just took that whole Nefud Desert sequence in Lawrence of Arabia a bit too seriously. I consider the influence fiction has over the future. In the futurism business, we talk a lot about the Star Trek communicator becoming the mobile phone. We talk about Arthur C. Clarke and commsats. We talk about whuffie and Klout. We talk about the dreams that came true, but not the nightmares. We don’t talk about Philip K. Dick. We don’t talk about, say, precrime and Homeland Security . But being a science fiction writer is a bit like being a pre-cog. It’s my job to have the nightmare before it becomes real.
Losing your wallet is like time travel
Los Angeles is the only city in California with a Canadian immigration bureau, and the CIC helpline (available only to callers in Canada) has told my partner that I must speak with the Canadian consulate before even attempting to come home.
Without photo ID I’m living like someone on the run: cash only, no chips; prepaid phone, calling cards. Last night, a member of the Intercontinental’s security staff watched me log in to my laptop before leaving me in my room. At the Western Union in the Mission I answer an identifying question in order to receive the money wired to me, as though I’ve forgotten a password. The woman behind the plexiglass has a stunning manicure: tiger stripes, Swarovski crystals. She asks me to count the money with her, silently, so no one else knows how much I’m carrying. At the Greyhound station I do it all over again, reciting a pass phrase to obtain my ticket. After talking to my credit card people about identity theft, it’s somehow comforting to revert to these old-fashioned methods of security. Money belts. Watching people in plate glass windows. Losing your wallet is like time travel.
I am also travelling back into my own history. I was born in Los Angeles. My parents met here, started a family, and moved to Seattle. Before I obtained my first passport, I carried a Washington State ID and a California birth certificate, and Canadian customs agents always asked why. “You were born in LA? Why is your ID from somewhere else?” Lately, American customs agents ask what I’m doing in Canada. “I married into it,” I say. “Welcome back,” they say, like I’m their prodigal daughter returned from slumming it up north.
I think about this as I stand in the toilet of a jouncing bus, piss and shit and blood sloshing up at the backs of my legs from the bouncing honey bucket. As if things weren’t hard enough, my period has struck. The interior of the little water closet now looks like a crime scene. The next day I find blood on my sleeves, my ankles, everywhere it was too dark for me to see. It’s the kind of story that’s funny, later: Hey, did I tell you about that time I changed a tampon in a moving vehicle while holding the door shut because it wouldn’t lock? At 4 am? In heels? But in the moment, all you’re thinking about is the guy in the seat behind you, and how he keeps curling his hands around your cushion and whispering to himself.
The window glass is shatterproof; at 5 am on 14 September I see the Pacific through the capillary cracks in its surface. The ocean spans unbroken into the distance. From this angle it looks as though the dark hills are crawling back to it with all their strength, their fingers outstretched to graze the waves. California, here I come.
T he Canadian consulate is at 550 South Hope Street. The address is, at best, cruelly ironic. It’s behind the Los Angeles Central Library, where Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 on public typewriters. The security guard at the Canadian consulate tells me go there and print off an application for a “Travel Document”. So I carry my luggage up three flights of concrete steps in 99 degrees Fahrenheit and locate the computer centre. I wait with the homeless and jobless for my 15 minutes at a terminal. We all seem to be applying for something: employment, social services, insurance. Standing there, I realise the people who whine about the death of the written word have probably never seen how full public libraries are.
Back at the consulate, I go through a metal detector and put my luggage through an X-ray. The real security measure is the guard, Chavez. He wears his rent-a-cop logo on his sleeve. He spends most of his time watching CNN and being impatient with people who don’t speak English. When I’m called up to the window, the woman behind it tells me to obtain a new US passport, and fly in to Canada with that.
“Don’t I need a Travel Document?” I ask. “The guard said I needed one of those, when I told him my situation. So did the CIC helpline. My partner called them from Toronto.”
“You could apply for one at the border, I guess. But you’ll have to get a police report first, anyway. To prove that your documents are really missing.”
A former university roommate picks me up from the consulate in the same car she drove in Seattle. She’s been driving it since she was thirteen. We’re almost thirty. She and her husband live in Hancock Park. In the car, we talk about my missing wedding ring. It was in my wallet. I used to see it jingling around with the loose change. I liked carrying it with me; it was a reminder of both the marriage I’d had and how profoundly I’d failed at it.
“Maybe the universe is telling you that you don’t need to carry that around with you any more,” my old roommate says.
O n my way to the Hollywood community police station on Wilcox, I see the actor Ron Perlman exiting Cahuenga. Celebrity culture informs much of the Los Angeles experience; outside the police station, the names of dead cops are emblazoned on stars embedded in the concrete, just like the Walk of Fame. My immigration attorney has advised me to file a report locally. The station looks more like a community pool than anything else: concrete, brick, desk, vending machines, Fox News. The desk sergeant, Keefer, is eating a salad. The man standing beside him is dealing with a family whose son is missing. They want an update. My problems instantly feel trivial.
I approach the desk and Keefer holds a hand up, tells me to take a seat on the bench. Between bites, he asks what I’m there for.
“I want to make a report. My wallet was stolen.”
“When?”
“Wednesday night. I was in San Francisco—”
“San Francisco? Then you’ll have to make the report to San Francisco. It’s a jurisdictional thing.”
“I tried. I made an online report, but they’ve rejected it because my passport was stolen, too.” It feels odd to have this conversation across five feet of space, but his leaden glare keeps me on the bench. “They told me to talk to you. So did my attorney.”
“I’m sorry they misled you.”
I take a moment. More people come in. Many of them are there to bail someone out, or to speak with detectives. Shift change seems to be happening; cops walk outside carrying their vests in one hand and duffles in the other. A couple of them are women. They look at us uncomfortably, pityingly, like shoppers trying to ignore panhandlers. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 42 per cent of violent crime in the US goes unreported . Maybe it’s not that victims are afraid of snitching. Maybe they just know how absurdly difficult the process is.
“So, you’re telling me to take another twelve-hour bus trip back to San Francisco, just to make my report?”
He dabs his mouth and shrugs. “All I know is that I can’t help you.”
I go outside. Fire up my phone. Talk to my partner. He calls San Francisco, then me. When I re-enter the station, the officer who remained silent while Keefer spoke to me makes eye contact and asks: “What did San Francisco say?”
“They told me to speak with a sergeant, please.”
“They wouldn’t take your report over the phone?”
“Nope.”
He shakes his head, rolls his eyes. “Pathetic. That department is fucking pathetic.” He leaves his terminal. “This is why we’re the best.”
Until this moment it has never really occurred to me that there might be some rivalry between the SFPD and the LAPD. Apparently, there is. I wonder if it’s similar to the rivalry between the LAPD and the LA County Sheriff’s Department that kept the Manson family killings unsolved for so long. The 1969 murder of Sharon Tate Polanski changed the landscape of American private security. Prior to her death, it was unusual for the wealthy of LA to install security systems, or employ bodyguards. Afterward, both became commonplace. It also ushered in the era of police officers as security consultants. Daryl Gates, lead detective on the Tate murder, founder of DARE, and former LAPD chief, went on to become the president of surveillance firm Global ePoint after serving its aviation division.
The sergeant comes out with Keefer. Both the sergeant (whose name is Garde) and the guy who despises the SFPD are Latino. Keefer is white. The LAPD’s history of race relations is less than stellar , but their hiring practices seem equitable. Sergeant Garde listens to my story, then glances at Keefer. He looks exasperated. “Just take the report. It’s a courtesy.”
Flow my tears, the policeman said.
T he passport office in the Wilshire Federal Building is likely the same one my long-form birth certificate came from. I return it there in order to obtain my new ID. It’s a tribute to La Corbusier: great slabs of white concrete rising from a pool of wasteful green. It’s there that my camera is stolen, because the feds don’t like cameras in their buildings – at least, not any cameras they didn’t install themselves – and they also don’t like affording their citizens a safe, secure place to store them while they wait. (They have nothing to say about smartphones. Applicants use them with impunity.) “You’ll have to go back to your car,” the guard tells me.
Drawing lines in the sand: natural features are rarely trusted to separate ‘friendly’ states
“I don’t have a car.”
“What?”
“I don’t have a car.”
“Oh.” This is LA. Everyone drives. “Well, I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Can you hold it for me?”
“No. We’re not allowed to do that.”
I’m already rushing for my appointment, so I leave it on a coffee cart with frantic pleas for someone to watch it. When I come back it’s gone. I’m surprised by how little I care. I’ve lost all the important photos already. The ones on the cards with the magstrips.
Being soft is hard
After procuring my new passport, three days later, I take a cab to the Canadian consulate. My immigration lawyer now says I need a “single entry visa” to go home, and that I can apply for one at the consulate. When I tell Chavez this, he laughs in my face.
“You don’t even have your forms?” He rolls his eyes at me. “It doesn’t matter. Immigration hours are over. They end at lunch.”
The website says there are immigration hours between 1:30 and 3:00 pm, but Chavez still tells me to come back Monday morning. I take the time to focus on his nametag.
“Chavez, right?”
“Right.”
I smile. I feel every centimetre of it crawl up my face. “Good to know.”
When I return the next week, Chavez is a lot nicer. I sit beside a woman carrying manila envelopes thick with forms. Her passport is red. She’s just barely keeping herself together. We look at each other and for a moment I’m right back there in Etobicoke, Toronto, waiting for my landing interview and sweating bullets. There is nothing to say. We try to smile at each other, and my number comes up.
The person behind the glass is the same as before, and she gives me the same advice: ignore what my lawyer said, and what the CIC hotline said, and fly home on my new US passport with an application for the travel document filled out just in case.
“Don’t apply for anything through this office,” she says. “The guys at the border, they’re the ones with your records.”
I fly back with a pro skater team finishing a tour. They’re all exhausted and hung over, discussing the endorsement deals they snagged on this last leg. One of their managers looks like Richard Branson but talks like Jeff Spicoli , and he tells me about the time he lost his Green Card.
“I left it in security, you know?” he says. “On that belt thing? They found it, two years later, cleaning the airport. Mailed it to me. But really, it was no trouble. You’ll be fine. You look legit.” He turns to his companion. “She looks legit, right?”
“Legit,” she says sleepily.
“Just be soft.” He accentuates it with a gentle motion of his hands, as though petting an animal. “Be soft.”
Being soft is hard. It’s hard when your ability to come home depends on one individual’s choice. It’s hard when your government’s website doesn’t agree with its consulate, neither of which agree with your attorney, who himself is spectacularly unhelpful. It’s hard when you know that the only reason you’ve made it this far is because you’ve got friends on your side, and that those without connections, without privilege, slip through the cracks. It’s hard when Robert Dziekanski died at Vancouver airport after trying for hours to tell Canadian customs agents that he wanted to see his mother. When he lost his temper, police officers tasered him five times. Anybody can die that way. All it takes is one freak-out. And the last time I was in this situation, I freaked out.
What Fitzgerald said about beating on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past? He was right. Everything we spend our youths outrunning catches up with us in adulthood. I wormed out of this situation once before. I begged and pleaded and made myself small. Facing the test a second time, I have no reason to do any of that. I have status. Rights. And perhaps more importantly, experience. I am not the girl I was seven years ago. I have a two graduate degrees, a two-book deal and a partner who dropped everything when he knew I was in trouble.
What I have is security. Real security. Not the kind you need cameras and X-rays and sniffer dogs for. This is not the same thing as having no fear. Fear is why we have those devices. But in the place beyond fear, there comes a realisation: that the fear doesn’t matter, because you have no choice.
I am thinking about this when I see Martin Sheen in line ahead of me. I take him as a good omen: nothing bad can happen while President Bartlet is watching . The young woman at secondary screening listens to my story without saying anything.
“I can apply for a Travel Document,” I say. “I have the application. And my Record of Landing. And my birth certificate, and some bills, and my tax records, and stuff like that—”
“But you have your old PR card,” she says, swiping its magstrip. “You’re in the system.”
“My attorney said I’d need a single-entry visa, and the website said I’d need a Travel Document.”
She tilts her head like a befuddled anime heroine. “You don’t need any of that,” she says. “You’re an American.”
“Oh.”
“I’m so sorry all that happened to you. I’m glad you made it back okay.” She hands me back my thick envelope of identification. “Welcome home.”
When I exit the doors, bags in hand, that’s when it happens. That moment I waited for years ago finally arrives. I wrap my arms around my partner, and the tears come. I am safe. I am home.