Instead I stand on the quiet curb with my bags, and my sister is late, as usual, and nothing has changed, not even the weather. It's about sixty degrees and sunny, bright late morning, just like it was on the day I left San Francisco for Jakarta. But two months and ten pounds later, I'm hugging myself and thinking Jesus Christ it's cold here.
A few minutes pass before my sister pulls up in her rattling old pickup, smiles and hugs me, and asks if I've been waiting long. I say no I haven't, like always. A rush of the familiar: my sister's late truck, the drone of please-do-not-leave-vehicles-unattended (a last echo of the S-21 torture center in Cambodia: DO NOT TELL ME EITHER ABOUT THE REVOLUTION OR YOUR IMMORALITIES...), a gust of Bay air. And just like that, it's entirely gone: swollen Jakarta, the Laotian hill tribes and Angkor Wat; the heat, the dirt, the jungle beauty, the noise -- even the Tokyo airport hotel where I ate mackerel for breakfast. I thought it seemed longer than two months since I left, but I was wrong: in half a second, it's gone.
I heard this anecdote about an American pilot. He was undergoing one of those post-9/11, FAA-mandated security checks before flying a passenger jet. A little annoyed with the lengthiness of the search, but wanting to lighten the mood in these confusing and edgy times for air travel, he said, with jocular ease, "You know, I'm the pilot. I can crash the plane if I want to."
So they put him in jail.
The day I left Laos, the immigration officer at Wattay (Vientiane) Airport noticed that I had overstayed my visa by one day. I was aware of this violation but other travelers told me they'd committed it with little or no consequence. Still, I immediately got nervous. I was in a communist country with a growing intolerance of foreigners' shenanigans. Maybe yesterday the government decided to crack down on all these disdainful Western tourists flouting the rule of law (rule of Lao?). Recently a Frenchman had been arrested in an opium den in Muang Sing, up near the Chinese border. The very rare "bust" of a Western drug user usually proceeds straight to a compulsory bribe of the MPs, whereupon the offender is released to the street and invited minutes later into another den. But the Frenchman had been stuck in a remote prison for weeks, barred from legal help (in Laos? what legal help?), awaiting military trial. Not long after I left Laos, the authorities jailed several Europeans for pushing democracy on the streets of Vientiane. What were they going to do to me?
The official gently stamped my passport and said, Five dollars, please.
Just then I recalled that this was the same checkpoint where, when I entered Laos two weeks earlier, the name written on my visa by the immigration agent, in order to identify me officially for my stay in Laos, was "Mr. Adam."
