The Illegal (8 page)

O
H, THIS WAS FUNNY.
T
HIS WAS RICH.
V
IOLA HILL
had been agitating for months to get off the sports page. So she could hardly refuse when Mike Bolton sent her out on an assignment dull enough to induce a coma: the Annual Awards Luncheon for the Best Essays Written by High School Students in Freedom State. Bolton said a major political figure would attend. Maybe even the prime minister. Whoever attended, Bolton said, she should get a quote.

Viola arrived early to get a spot at the front of the Dixon Theatre. Being low down in a wheelchair, she had to be in the heart of the action. The only way to grab someone for a quick interview would be to catch their eye or call loudly. The awards were for essays about science, geography, literature, culture and politics. There were two categories: one for students ages fifteen and under, and the other for students sixteen to eighteen. Three of the ten winners hailed from the same school: the Clarkson Academy for the Gifted. Honestly. Anybody suffering from sleep problems should just throw their meds in the trash bin and come to this ceremony. The prime minister had skipped the event and sent a cabinet minister instead.

When it came time to award the grand prize, Viola stopped yawning. It was for the best essay written by a high school student of any age, on any subject. All other award winners had received a thousand-dollar cheque, but this prize came with a catch. The essay writers had had to supply a paragraph explaining what they needed
to further their own academic advancement and outlining a reasonable budget.

Federal Immigration Minister Rocco Calder was called to the stage to announce the winner. He was a tall, buff, blue-eyed, square-jawed, middle-aged white dude who was a recreational runner—Viola respected him for that, if not for his politics. Calder, a fabulously successful used car salesman and newcomer to politics, didn’t know a damn thing about immigration. He had been transportation minister but had recently acquired the immigration portfolio in a surprise cabinet shuffle. It had to be the worst job in the world: to preside over a national effort to deport people without documentation. But he had no voice, authority or independence in cabinet. Everybody knew that the prime minister and his advisers ran and controlled immigration policies and practices. The government called undocumented people “Illegals,” but Viola refused to use the term. As far as she was concerned, it was fair to accuse somebody of
doing
something illegal but not to say that they
were
illegal. Viola wondered if Calder believed in the “Deport the Illegals” movement that had brought his government to power, or if he was just a lemming.

Calder took the steps to the stage two at a time. Students, teachers, parents and education officials filled the auditorium. Calder told the audience that the prime minister sent his regrets but had asked him to convey his regards, and that he was proud to participate in a ceremony celebrating academic excellence. Yada, yada, yada. He summoned the donor of the funds for the best essay prize. A woman climbed up the stairs. White woman, as old as the hills. Blue-eyed too, and hair turned as white as a cloud. Steady step, and a no-bullshit gaze as she looked over the audience. Calder mentioned her name, but Viola didn’t catch it. She checked her program.
Ivernia Beech
.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Calder said. Viola sighed. Loudly. What self-respecting modern woman wanted to be called a lady these days? And gentlemen were a vanishing species. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the minister repeated, “the best essay by a high school student
in Freedom State in the year 2018 is entitled ‘North and South, We Are All Ortizians.’ The winner, from the Clarkson Academy for the Gifted, is . . . John Falconer.”

There was a small round of applause. The very title of the essay seemed to slap the ruling Family Party in the face. Freedom State was in the North Ortiz Sea, Zantoroland in the South Ortiz Sea. The Family Party had come to power for the first time in the history of Freedom State two years earlier and was implementing policies to draw a firm line between those seas, to stop the ships carrying refugees north and to live up to its election campaign promises to initiate a robust deportation program.

“John, would you come to the stage?”

A boy ran up the stairs in his Clarkson Academy uniform. But his tie was loosened, and he wore running shoes. He looked twelve years old. Didn’t look like he even belonged in high school. And there was one other thing. Every other prize winner was white. Virtually every person in the audience, except for Viola, was white. But this kid had curly hair and a coffee and cream complexion, and it was clear to Viola that he had some black in him.

“Congratulations, John,” the minister said, shaking the boy’s hand.

“Thank you, Minister. Could I get an interview with you?”

People laughed.

“Why sure, boy,” the minister said.

“Do you promise?” the boy said.

The minister’s mouth fell open, but he recovered and said, “Yes, I do. How old are you?”

“I’m fifteen, but you should know that ‘boy’ is a condescending way to refer to people of African heritage.”

A murmur went through the crowd, but the minister smiled. “Well, I’m sorry, son, I didn’t know about your heritage. I’ll give you that interview, but today we’re here to congratulate you.”

Ivernia Beech shook John’s hand vigorously. “Fabulous essay,” she said, “just fabulous.” Turning to the audience, she read from a
slip of paper: “‘John has written a historical essay about the racial politics of deportation in Freedom State in the nineteenth century. His prize is ten thousand dollars’ worth of computer and video-recording equipment, which he has requested so he can make a documentary film about AfricTown.’”

She gave the boy the cheque. They posed for a photo.

“You’re helping me go after a dream,” John told her.

“Go do it,” she said. “And while you’re at it, give ’em hell.”

“I intend to,” he said. He reached to shake her hand, but she gave him a hug instead.

“When you’re eighty-five, you don’t get to give out many hugs,” she said. People in the audience laughed. “And when you reach my age, you don’t always get to do something meaningful. But to help a student move forward with his artistic passion means a great deal to me.”

Mrs. Beech gave John a slip of paper and told him to call her up. “Can’t cook to save my life, but I’ll take you out to lunch.” She smiled and exited the stage.

“Son, that’s an incredible achievement,” the minister said. “But will it be safe for a young fellow to be wandering about AfricTown with a video camera?”

“Should be safe enough,” John said. “I live there.”

While the audience clapped, Viola scribbled as fast as she could. She looked up and hollered as John walked off the stage. Sometimes hollering was the only way for a woman in a wheelchair to get any attention.

“John Falconer. Over here, please.”

He approached her obediently.

“Viola Hill, the
Clarkson Evening Telegram
.”

He shook her hand. “Sounds like a good job. One day, I’d like to write for the
Telegram
.”

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” Viola said. “But never mind that. Did you say you live in AfricTown?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Bungalow Hill. Brown shipping container. Yellow stripes. Next to Water Tap 17.”

“Whose child are you?”

“You know AfricTown?” John asked.

“Born and raised,” Viola said. “But I’m asking the questions.”

“How about we each ask questions,” John said, “’cause now I’m making this documentary, and I could talk to you.”

“How about we respect the fact that I’m on a deadline for a daily newspaper? So whose child are you?”

“My mom is Mary Falconer. My dad disappeared before I was born. Bartholomew Falconer—you know him?”

“Nope. And you are fifteen and in Grade 9 at the Clarkson Academy for the Gifted.”

“Yep! You still live in AfricTown? It’d be hard to move about in a wheelchair.”

“I got out when I lost the use of my legs.”

“Oh,” John said. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Don’t be,” Viola said. “If I hadn’t had the accident, I probably would have stayed. And maybe I’d be dead now, or strung out on drugs or booze. I have to ask you this. John, are you black?”

“You know how it works. My mom is white. But my dad, he was mixed. Half and half.”

“Good enough for me. According to the customs of this country, he was black and so are you. You ever heard of any other black student at the Clarkson Academy for the Gifted?”

“I’m the first.”

“What’s tuition cost?”

“Fifty thousand dollars a year.”

“You on scholarship?”

“Ain’t no other way,” he said with a smile.

“Can I get a copy of your essay?”

He pulled folded papers from his inside breast pocket. “Here—”

“I’ll get this back to you. Gotta run. Give me your cell and email.”

Viola wrote them down, wheeled away and got to Calder before he left. She asked how he felt about awarding a prize to a student who had criticized the country’s immigration policies.

Calder said, “Today it’s not about politics. It’s about academic excellence. I respect this boy’s intelligence.”

Viola’s story made the back of the A section. Her first byline off the sports page. She persuaded Bolton to run a short excerpt from John’s essay as a sidebar.

N
ORTH AND
S
OUTH,
W
E
A
RE
A
LL
O
RTIZIANS

BY
J
OHN
F
ALCONER

G
RADE 9,
C
LARKSON
A
CADEMY FOR THE
G
IFTED

We brought thousands of people from Zantoroland in chains, enslaved them here in Freedom State and used them to build what is now one of the world’s biggest economies. But when slavery was abolished in 1834, we solved the “Negro problem” by deporting those same slaves and their descendants. We sent them back by the shipload into the South Ortiz Sea, paying Zantoroland a twenty-five-pound-sterling resettlement fee for each man, woman or child repatriated.

It was a complex job, so authorities in Freedom State created a racial grading system to determine who could stay and who had to go. If you were defined as full black, half black (mulatto), one-quarter black (quadroon) or even one-eighth black (octoroon), you were packed up and sent to Zantoroland. Even if you’d never seen the country. Even if you were born in Freedom State. But if you were defined as one-sixteenth black (quintoon) or less, then you were allowed to reintegrate into the white race and stay in Freedom State.

Most blacks were indeed forced to leave. Some managed to stay. Others began returning illegally in boats. Although the trans-Ortizian slave trade ended in 1834 and the Grand Repatriation drew to a close some two decades later, Freedom State and Zantoroland continue to be connected. A steady stream of migrants continue to move north, settling
in AfricTown on the southern outskirts of our capital city of Clarkson. People refer all the time to AfricTown as a slum, a ghetto, a township. It is none of the above. AfricTown is a community. Some hundred thousand people live there, many of them in fifteen thousand used shipping containers owned and rented out by the unofficial queen of AfricTown, Lula DiStefano. I know. I live there, and Lula is my landlady.

Viola had hoped Bolton would continue to let her write for the news department. But she had only been sent to cover the national essay awards because the education reporter had called in sick that day. He returned to the job twenty-four hours later, and Viola returned to sports.

S
TERN.
S
MUG.
Y
OUNG.
W
HAT DID THEY KNOW
? W
ELL,
it wasn’t so much what they knew but what they could do. Three young men from the Office for Independent Living, ready to assess her ability to drive, manage her own money and live alone. She couldn’t help but think about how badly dressed they were. But she had to get a grip. Ivernia Beech absolutely had to concentrate.

Interrogator Number One stood to get a glass of water. His dress shirt was wrinkled and dislodged from his pants. What was he? Twenty-six? Young enough to be her great-grandson. He was saying something. This was not a court of law, he was saying, but it could make recommendations about her fitness for independent living. And now he was asking a question.
Concentrate.
Yes, she told him, she was aware of who she was and where she was at the time of the accident. He asked where, for the record, was that? Well, she said, it was directly outside the Lox and Bagel on Aberdeen Road, two blocks north of Ruddings Park. Snidely, foolishly, she added, This is in the city of Clarkson and country of Freedom State. He ignored her and asked, When exactly was the accident? Ivernia wanted to ask why he didn’t look it up in his stupid report. But that wouldn’t be politic, would it? So she just said that the accident took place yesterday at 9 a.m. He asked where she had been going. To the Lox and Bagel, she said.

Now it was the second interrogator’s turn. His shirt too was in need of ironing. What was it with twenty-something bureaucrats
these days? Did no one teach them how to dress? Was a country’s wealth inversely proportional to the ability of its young men to don a pressed shirt in the morning? He asked about Ivernia’s son. Naturally, that got her wondering about the worst possible outcome. No matter that she was white in a country where that mattered, educated and well off. When you were over eighty and caused a car accident, you could lose it all. For starters, they could strip her of her driver’s licence. Permanently. They could tell the Office for Independent Living that Ivernia Beech was not fit for single living. This, of course, was exactly what her son, Jimmy, wanted: Termination of her driver’s licence. Forced eviction from her home. Power of attorney over her bank accounts. With a son like that, who needed enemies? Terrorists who blew up airplanes had nothing over an underemployed, twice-divorced son with nothing better to do than go after his mother’s assets. Any man over fifty who still went by the name of Jimmy was a man not to be trusted. Even if he was her son. Thank God Jimmy wasn’t in the room. Ivernia already had her hands full.

Now came the last interrogator’s turn.

“May I call you Ivernia?” he asked.

“I am three times your age, and you may call me Mrs. Beech,” she said.

“Well enough, Mrs. Beech. Could you tell us one more time, in your own words, what happened yesterday?”

Ivernia drew a long breath. Some twenty years ago, when she was in her sixties and still had relatively nimble fingers, she had taken up the classical guitar. If you played an instrument—something new, something you had never touched before—it was said to prevent your brain from rotting. The guitar instructor introduced her to the music of Fernando Sor and encouraged Ivernia to breathe while she played. She told him she had come to study music, not yoga. She had to abandon the instrument after it gave her tennis elbow. And now, as she ran once more through the events leading up to the accident, she exhaled slowly—just as the guitar teacher had taught her—and
replayed in her mind the single moment of kindness and light in an otherwise all-around shitty day.

Ivernia had been driving south on Aberdeen Road. She had already passed Main Street. And Queen Street. Now she was entering the thick of The Village—the attractive section of Clarkson lined with cafés, shops, beauty salons and bookstores. Five blocks ahead were the Parliament Building on the left and the Freedom Building with offices for federal politicians on the right. Beyond them was the giant Ruddings Park, and beyond that the railway tracks, the formal end of the city, and after five kilometres of no man’s land, the sudden mushrooming of AfricTown. But Ivernia wasn’t going anywhere near that far. The Lox and Bagel was located right here, in the heart of The Village, and all Ivernia had to do was find a parking spot.

She was driving her late husband’s 1999 Oldsmobile Intrigue. It was nineteen years old, not a speck of rust. Oversized, like a car fuelled with steroids, but it worked like a charm. Southbound traffic kept Ivernia to twenty kilometres an hour. It was a warm spring day. She had the windows down. Above the sound of traffic, she heard a man singing. Good voice. He had a lilting, foreign accent. And he was singing a country song. She glanced to her left. Nothing. To her right. There he was. A young black man was running as fast as her car. What a joy it must be, Ivernia thought, to move one’s body with that ease and speed. Like Ivernia, he was heading south on Aberdeen. She wondered why he was in the road, but then she noticed that pedestrians clogged the sidewalk. He was in his mid-twenties. As thin as a pencil. Strapped to his waistband was an iPod, and from it white wires ran up to the buds in his ears. Clearly, he had no idea how loud he was singing the country hit that had become as familiar as the national anthem.

I been running for you, baby

Running all the time

But you’re running for another heart

And the heart you want ain’t mine.

Ivernia had turned off the radio a good twenty times in the last year just to avoid hearing another note of that song, but it sounded funny and somehow touching coming from this strange runner. Traffic slowed. He ran by her door. His head was bobbing to the music, and yet his eyes were wide open. He caught her looking at him and smiled. She smiled too, and then she pulled ahead of him as the lane before her opened up. It was odd that a man moving that fast could sing as he ran.

She left him behind as she accelerated. Traffic moved quickly, and Ivernia caught two green lights in a row. There, up ahead just one block, was the Lox and Bagel. Parking on Aberdeen was murder. But just ahead of her, directly in front of the Lox and Bagel, a car pulled out. Ivernia slowed down. A space big enough for her Oldsmobile. No fire hydrant. No reason she couldn’t park there. She detested parallel parking, but there was no option. She pulled up beside a Jaguar, put the Olds into reverse and checked the rear-view mirror. Lots of pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk, but there was nothing between her and the BMW parked behind her. She backed halfway in, turning the wheel clockwise to ease into the spot and then counterclockwise to straighten it out. She stopped midway to make sure she was fine. The Olds was such a big car. Everything looked okay. And then it happened. She was about to press down on the accelerator, ever so gently, to continue reversing, when a baby cried. Loudly. She had meant to jam her foot on the brake, but instead, she mashed it down on the accelerator. The Olds shot back like a spooked horse, and the next instant, Ivernia felt metal crumple and heard glass shatter. A woman began screaming. Ivernia couldn’t see the woman or the baby. Had she hit them? She flipped the gear into drive, pushed on the accelerator pedal again, and charged forward, catching and demolishing the back left end of the Jaguar. She put her car in park and turned off the ignition, then opened the door to more screaming.

Ivernia got out of the car. A woman on the sidewalk stood next to a stroller. The baby was in her arms.

“Did I hit you?” Ivernia asked.

“My car!”

“Are you hurt?” Ivernia asked.

“No, but almost. I was this close,” the woman said, holding her thumb and index finger apart, “when you smashed into my car. And here I was with my baby.”

“But are you okay?”

“This close!” the woman shouted.

Then the singing runner showed up. “Hello, ma’am,” he said to the young mother. “May I help?”

She looked grateful. The runner lifted the stroller back to the far side of the sidewalk. The woman had dropped a bag of groceries. He retrieved cans and bags, bending and straightening until he had stored them all in the stroller. The mother spoke to him reverently. It was hard to believe that such kindness could come from a mouth that moments ago had been so harsh.

“That is so sweet of you,” she said.

“No worries.” The runner then saw Ivernia. Looked straight at her. “Ma’am, are you all right?”

“Yes, quite.” But she wasn’t all right at all, and he could see it in her eyes.

“Why don’t you sit down?” he said.

There was a bench at the edge of the sidewalk, in front of the Lox and Bagel. He led her to it, resting his fingertips on her shoulder. She tried to remember the last time anyone had touched any part of her body in a kind, solicitous way.

“Everything is going to be okay. Nobody is hurt, right?”

She nodded. He straightened, went to her car door, pulled out her purse and car keys and returned with them.

“Sit here. You will need your things. Are you okay, ma’am? Breathe a little.”

Ivernia stared at him with glassy eyes. The earbuds were strung over his shoulder. From them, she detected the tinny sound of country music.

“I heard you singing, back there,” she said.

He smiled. “I sing when I train,” he said.

Train, she thought. What an interesting verb. It must have been inspired by the noun.
To train
. Meaning, to put oneself in motion, just like a train. She heard a siren. She looked up and saw the police vehicle two blocks away.

He said, “God bless, must run, take care. Don’t worry. Everything will be okay.”

Once more he touched her shoulder. Ivernia felt the calm spread through her body. Nobody was hurt. What was the worst that could happen?

“Wait,” she said. “What is your name?”

He hesitated, smiled once more and said, “Roger Bannister. Goodbye and good luck.” He set off running again, southbound on Aberdeen Road in the direction of Ruddings Park.

“Roger Bannister,” she mumbled to herself. She knew that name. The British runner. The first one to break the four-minute mile. He did it on May 6, 1954. Sixty-four years ago. She remembered. She was twenty-one years old, and it was the day that she and Ernie married. She wished that she had had time to tell that to the runner.

A hand was on her shoulder, a firm hand.

“Ma’am. Ma’am. Were you involved in the accident? Are you the owner of that Oldsmobile?”

She looked into the eyes of a square-jawed police officer whose expression seemed to say,
You’ve gone and ruined my perfectly good day
. Perhaps Ivernia should have waited for a lawyer. Or fought the charge. Or sought to plea bargain. She knew all about these things. But she was an old woman, and she had no mind for subtleties, so she just looked at him and said, “It all comes down to one thing, Officer. I screwed up. So can we get on with it?”

It was a day later now, and her licence was temporarily suspended, her car impounded, and she was feeling entirely suffocated in the meeting room of the Office for Independent Living. She was bursting with impatience. She wanted out. Whatever they were
going to do to her, she wanted it to be over. So here she was telling her three inquisitors one more time that she realized the gravity of the situation but did not want a lawyer.

“Could we just get this done?” she asked, keeping her hands under the table so the three inquisitors could not see them shaking. When you reached the age of eighty-five, hands were simply not to be trusted. Ivernia tried to calm herself by thinking of the gentle face of the runner. The one who had stopped to help everybody, herself included. The runner was the only person who had said a kind word to her that entire day. She wondered where he was from. Zantoroland? From what Ivernia had read in the papers, the country was a mess. There were reports that the Zantoroland government had been torturing and executing members of its Faloo ethnic minority, so people were fleeing the country. But here in Freedom State, the government led by the Family Party kept deporting refugees back to Zantoroland.

Ivernia hoped the runner was not a refugee, or, if he was, that his life had not been too hard and that he would not be caught and deported like the others. She focused on her breathing and on good thoughts. Fernando Sor . . . the runner singing country music . . . marrying her husband on the same day that Roger Bannister ran the Miracle Mile in 3:59. Ernie had been good to her, from their first day together to their last.

Breathe, Ivernia. Breathe, keep breathing, and just answer their stupid questions.