Jonathan Evison - This is Your Life, Harriet Chance!

“All the same, I’ll just keep the bag with me. Now, could you kindly direct me to my vessel, dear?”

He waves vaguely down the corridor. “Just follow the signs.”

Hobbling into the fray, Harriet finds herself immediately disoriented by all the activity. The bright corridor is crammed wall-to-wall with people, every last one of them moving more purposefully than Harriet. Within thirty feet, she regrets not having checked the bag. By the time she reaches the dogleg, where the corridor empties into a giant terminal, the mass of people spreading out like liquid, Harriet is out of breath.

There are signs, all right. Too many. Some of them in foreign languages. There are arrows, hallways, monitors, glass doors, and kiosks — all of them beginning to look a little fuzzy around the edges. Weak in the knees, Harriet spins a slow half circle, scanning the terminal, looking desperately for a uniform — any uniform. But the longer Harriet searches, the closer her uneasiness noses toward anxiety.

Finally, like an angel, she appears: a smooth-faced Asian woman, whose age Harriet puts somewhere between thirteen and forty-five. An almond-eyed beauty, with no makeup and no wedding ring. She sets the daintiest of hands on Harriet’s back.

“You are lost?” she says.

“Yes, dear, I’m afraid I am.”

“Do you have boarding pass?”

Harriet digs her plastic pouch out of her purse and begins rummaging through it.

“May I?” the woman gently urges.

“Please,” says Harriet, handing over the pouch.

The woman flips through the papers efficiently until she locates the boarding pass, which she surveys expertly.

“Ah,” she says. “Follow me.”

“You’re a lifesaver, dear.”

“Call me Sinta.”

Not only does dear Sinta escort Harriet through the labyrinthine confusion of the central terminal to customs, all the while maintaining a manageable pace, she is kind enough to convey the wheelie bag for the duration of the journey. Sinta even offers to assist Harriet with her declaration forms.

“Oh, no, I’ll be fine, thank you,” she hears herself saying.

The twenty minutes it takes to fill out her declaration forms proves restful. Nerves settled, Harriet joins the customs line, which switches back and forth at least twenty times on its way across a giant receiving room. Line is a misnomer — it’s a throng, a veritable stockyard. The young man with the pitted cheeks had not been exaggerating the conditions: it’s hot in there, all right. Stifling. The air is oppressive, the odors too various to catalog — butter, sweat, the unmistakable boiled-egg offal of flatulence. And Harriet is certain she’s identified the culprit on the latter count: the morbidly obese fellow in a sleeveless T-shirt, the one with the dirty baseball cap that says DAMN STRAIGHT! A gentleman might have had the decency to step out of line and find a bathroom. At the very least, he might apologize. And certainly his shirt would have sleeves.

The longer Harriet lingers in the interminable line, creeping forward by the tiniest of increments, the lower her opinion of humanity sinks. Gads, but look at us. Like cattle. Sweating, stinking, overfed cattle. Surely, the species is devolving, even as culture accelerates, speeding headlong at an unstoppable pace toward what was sure to be a brick wall. Values erode, as waistlines bulge, timeworn conventions like polite deference to elders and good citizenry go the way of the powdered wig. And eventually, sleeves disappear.

Oh, Harriet knows she’s simply exhausted, she knows if she could ever manage to locate her cabin and get off her feet for a few minutes, her attitude would improve. Finally, after forty-five minutes of glacial progress, Harriet reaches the front of the line and at some length proffers her passport and forms as the customs agent, his reading glasses roosting on the bridge of his nose, peers benignly down at her from his podium, subjecting the passport to a cursory once-over before passing it back.

“Not packing any fruits or vegetables?”

“No.”

“Not carrying in excess of ten thousand dollars in Canadian currency?”

“Heavens, no. Will I be needing Canadian currency on board?”

“No ma’am. Are you transporting anything on behalf of a second party, or were you approached or otherwise solicited to transport goods on anyone else’s behalf?”

“Pardon me? I don’t understand. Do you mean Sinta?”

The customs agent says something quietly over his shoulder to a security officer. The next thing Harriet knows, a second agent is at her elbow, asking her to step aside, even as the officer steps forward, taking possession of her wheelie bag.

“Is there some problem?” Harriet inquires.

But neither the officer or the second agent are willing to offer her an explanation. “This way, please,” says the agent.

Bewildered, Harriet is escorted down a hallway to a nearby holding room, one of several small, less-than-cheery rooms on either side of the corridor.

“Sit, please,” says the officer as the second agent leaves the room. Harriet’s heart is racing as she lowers herself into a metal folding chair.

The officer, a younger man than either of the agents, with muscular arms and a slight underbite, pulls up a second folding chair and seats himself directly across from Harriet, whereupon he silently considers her for what feels like an eternity.

“Who is Sinta?”

“You mean the young lady who assisted me with my bag?”

He frowns. “Do you know Sinta? What’s her last name?”

“I have no idea. I assumed she worked here.”

“She approached you? Where? In the terminal?”

“Yes. She could see I was quite lost. I might have fallen to the floor and had a heart attack in there, and people would have stepped right over me. Sinta was the only one kind enough to help me with my bag.”

“So, she touched the bag?”

“She rolled the blasted thing clear across the terminal. If it weren’t for the dear woman, I might never have arrived here.”

“I see. Did she ask you to transport anything for her?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Did she open your bag or your purse? Did she offer you anything?”

“Why, she only helped me with my papers.”

The officer looks down at her grimly. “What papers? She touched them?”

Even as he drills her, Harriet can see two dark-haired men through the glass, rummaging through her wheelie bag. All that meticulous packing, all that tucking and folding and consolidating for nothing.

“What is the meaning of this? Just what are you alluding to with all of these questions? And why are those men making a shambles of my toiletries?”

No sooner does Harriet lodge this complaint than she sees one of the dark-haired officials unearth the Greek yogurt container from the bottom of her suitcase. Subjecting the parcel to a wary visual inspection, he soon hands it off to the other man, who proceeds to shake the receptacle a number of times like a maraca. Much to Harriet’s discomfiture, he promptly removes the seal, peels back the lid, and peers down into the depths, which both men regard with suspicion, alternately sniffing and discussing the contents before the taller of the two men, a reedy fellow with dark circles beneath his eyes, inexplicably dips a tentative finger into Bernard’s remains and touches it to his tongue.

Harriet shoots up from her chair. “Good heavens, what are they doing?”

But before she can protest further, she watches through the glass as a rather skittish Doberman pinscher is escorted into the room and persuaded to sniff Bernard’s mortal remains.

“What on earth? I’ve never heard of such a thing. Do I look like a terrorist to you? For heaven’s sake, I’m Episcopalian!”