He had a baby face, which should have endeared him to me, but there was something churlish about the curl of his mouth that put me on guard. This worst-case officer might have been in his early forties, his hair dark enough to approach the black of our own and spiked into a formation that looked like he wanted to erect fences on his head. I’d immediately picked my last choice out of the six non-options arrayed before us.
Admittedly my game relied upon judging by appearances, equating deep scowls with mild xenophobia or a tinge of alcoholic rosacea with a haughty impatience. From our experience, the border agents varied widely in their attitude toward the aliens they processed. As we got closer to the head of the line, I played this silly mental game where I tried to predict which officer would call on us, and then to hazard whether that was a good or bad thing. Our stream of aliens fed into about half a dozen booths, each with a computer terminal and a nonalien uniformed officer perched inside, visible from the waist up. We disembarked into a humid tunnel in JFK, and despite our quick-stepping, we found ourselves as always in an interminably long line for noncitizens by the time we reached the border checkpoint. Now I wonder: Is it possible to give someone too much space to grieve?
The funeral had been just a few days ago, after all. Marlin seemed cold toward me during the flight, but I didn’t think much of it. After the four-hour layover in Hong Kong, we got on a plane for New York.
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