Detour

SIXTEEN

They were showing a comedy with Reese Witherspoon. Paul knew it was a comedy because several passengers were laughing.

He was watching the movie too. He had no idea what it was about.

Something was wrong with his stomach—other than the obvious. When he touched it, it felt tight as a bongo drum. He could play “Wipe Out” on it. He was increasingly nauseous.

I will not throw up, he told himself.

If he threw up the condoms, he’d have to swallow them again; it had been hard enough to get them down the first time. Each swallow had triggered a reflexive urge to vomit. How had he managed it exactly? By using various and only half-successful stratagems.

First he’d pictured Joanna and Joelle sitting in that room—focused on the end benefit. That worked only for a while. So he’d changed tack, imagined each condom as a kind of local delicacy—a strange-tasting delicacy, even a repulsive one, but one that as a politically correct visitor he felt honor-bound to try.

When that didn’t work either, when he gagged and almost brought everything back up, he’d thought of them as individual doses of medicine. Something prescribed to save his life—his life and theirs.

Somehow he’d managed to get all thirty-six down.

The hard part was keeping them there.

The plane had taken off two hours behind schedule. In order to avoid an unexpected turbulence over the Caribbean, the pilot had climbed to thirty thousand feet. This would add time to the flight, the pilot explained, but better late than bumpy, he added in that neutral midwestern twang every pilot in the world seemed to speak with. He was amending the flight path with their comfort in mind.

Paul’s comfort was in negative integers.

Negative numbers had always fascinated him. They were the dark side of the moon, the antimatter of the numerical universe that he called home. He was traveling through this universe now.

“Are you all right?” the man next to him asked. Evidently, he wasn’t watching the Reese Witherspoon movie. He was watching Paul. Paul looked weird.

“Just a little nauseous,” Paul answered.

The man seemed to pull back. Somehow he’d increased the physical distance between them without actually moving. Paul understood—nausea was the last word you wanted to hear during a long flight. Next to bomb, of course.

One of his industry’s standard jokes: Did you hear about the actuary who brought a fake bomb onto a plane? He wanted to decrease the chances there’d be another bomb on the plane.

Ha, ha.

“You want me to call the flight attendant?” the man asked warily.

“No. I’ll be fine.” Paul could feel individual beads of sweat on his forehead. His stomach was rumbling like thunder before a deluge.

“Well, okay,” the man said. He didn’t look like it was okay.

Paul tried to lose himself in the movie again. Reese was a lawyer or something. She kept saying cute things and smiled a lot.

He was going to throw up.

Paul stood and made his way to the business-class lavatory. Only it was occupied and someone else was waiting to use it. A mother holding her four-year-old boy by the hand. The boy was shuffling his feet and periodically grabbing at the crotch of his pants.

“He has to go,” the mother said apologetically.

Paul peered through the half-opened curtain leading to first class. No one was waiting at that lavatory. He went through the curtain toward the front of the plane.

“Excuse me, sir.”

A flight attendant had materialized out of nowhere. He was slim, young, but very determined-looking. Right now he was determined that Paul, a business-class passenger, not make it into the first-class lavatory.

“We like you to use the lavatory in your section,” he said.

“So would I. Only it’s occupied. So—”

“If you’ll just wait until the lavatory is available,” the man interrupted.

“I can’t wait. I’m not feeling well.”

The first-class passengers were all looking at him. Paul could feel their eyes boring into his back. In the hierarchy of planedom, they were Brahmins and he was an Untouchable. This might have embarrassed him in his previous life. But in this life he was a drug smuggler about to upchuck his illicit cargo into the aisle, so he didn’t care. He needed to get to that bathroom.

The flight attendant, whose name was Roland, was looking him over as if trying to ascertain if he was telling the truth. Was he really sick, or was he attempting to con his way into the glories of the first-class lavatory?

Paul didn’t wait for him to decide. He moved forward, physically brushing past a defeated-looking Roland. He entered the bathroom and shut the door.

His nausea had reached a pretty much unendurable level.

He looked at himself in the mirror. His face was pasty and wet.

He closed his eyes.

He pictured Joanna shut in that airless room. Sitting on that filthy mattress. Alone. He wondered if she was praying for him, revisiting the faith of her youth, when she’d dutifully gone to confession every Sunday and renounced her girlish sins. He hoped so.

I will not throw up. He said this not just to himself, but to God. Okay, they weren’t exactly on a first-name basis, but he was willing to give it a shot. He was ready to let bygones be bygones and become friends.

Don’t let me throw up.

Rephrased now as an actual prayer, a plea from someone in need of a little godly intervention.

He took deep breaths. He splashed cold water onto his face. He clenched his hands into fists. He purposely avoided looking at the toilet, which seemed like a visual invitation to upchuck the drugs.

It worked.

He felt his nausea subsiding. He was still queasy, but he could actually imagine making it back to his seat without vomiting. Maybe there was something to this religious stuff, after all. Maybe even a jaded God had been moved to pity.

Someone knocked on the door.

“What’s going on in there?”

Roland. Still sounding kind of indignant.

“I’m coming out,” Paul said.

“Fine.”

A minute later Paul opened the door and maneuvered past Roland, who smelled strongly of lavender. He made it back to his seat, where the man next to him eyed him suspiciously.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

Paul nodded. He turned onto his side and closed his eyes. He couldn’t sleep, but he’d pretend to.

He had two hours left till customs.

THERE WAS A DOG AT THE BOTTOM OF THE ESCALATOR.

A German shepherd with a thick black harness around it.

Paul couldn’t see who had hold of that harness, because the ceiling sloped to the angle of the escalator and restricted his vision.

It could be a blind person, he thought. A beggar with one of those white cups in his hand and a sign that said I am blind. Please help me.

Or it could be the other kind of person who would be holding a harnessed dog in an international airport. Waiting for a flight from Colombia.

He thought about turning around and heading back up against the flow. The escalator was packed—he’d never make it.

The escalator seemed to be moving at SLP speed, the slowest setting on your typical VCR. The person holding the dog was filling in by small increments, as if he were being drawn by a sketch artist in Washington Square Park.

First the shoes.

Black, sturdy, thick soles. Not necessarily a blind person’s shoes, but not necessarily not.

Now the legs.

Thin and short and covered in dark blue.

Denim? Or the polyester weave favored by certain government agencies? It was hard to tell. The man’s belt buckle rose into view, something substantial that seemed to serve some greater purpose than merely holding up his pants. The kind of buckle that made a statement.

The shirt began to materialize.

Paul was praying it would be a T-shirt.

Something that said I Love New York.

Or My son-in-law went to Florida but all I got was THIS. Really praying—like back in the first-class lavatory.

It was white and buttoned. There was some kind of badge on it.

A policeman. A customs man.

When Paul entered the last stage of the slowest escalator on earth, he saw he was right and wrong. It was a customs agent, all right, but a woman. She had dyed-blond hair tied into a tight ponytail, ostensibly to keep it from getting into her diligently steely eyes.

It didn’t really matter what sex she was. He was focusing on the dog.

A sniff dog—isn’t that what they called them?

The officer and dog were set up just to the left of the escalator. Paul tried to edge closer to the right railing. The dog was sitting on his hind legs with his quivering black nose pointed straight into the air.

He was wondering. He believed these dogs were capable of sniffing out drugs inside gas tanks, plastic dolls, even concrete canisters. What about people? Through layers of intestines and fat and condoms and skin?

Seriously sweating skin. Skin that had broken out in a veritable rash of sweat that threatened to turn him into a walking dishrag.

He stepped off the escalator. He could sense the customs woman staring straight at him. He could only sense this, because he was trying not to look at her. He was trying instead to look bored, blasé, nonchalant—to look this way in a direction that wouldn’t bring his gaze in the vicinity of hers.

She must’ve been wondering what might cause a passenger from Colombia to be sweating bullets. No, more like an actual fusillade.

Paul could actually hear the dog sniffing; it sounded like someone with a bad cold. His chest tightened into a single painful knot. There were three supposed warning signs of a heart attack—excessive sweating, chest pain, and numbness—and he currently had all three. Only his numbness was more of the mental variety. He was so scared he couldn’t think.

And then he did a very strange thing.

He petted the dog.

The shepherd had begun emitting a series of nervous whines, and Paul was convinced that in one second the officer would be asking him to step out of the line and accompany her to a special room where she’d X-ray him and then arrest him for drug smuggling.

He was facing his fear head-on. The way his father had once advised him to do when a seven-year-old Paul had confided his terror of roller coasters in the middle of Hershey Park. His father put him on the cloud-scraping Evil Twister, where Paul had promptly thrown up all over him.

Maybe blatant hubris would actually work this time.

The dog went stock-still and stared up at him with an eerily focused expression. His ears flattened—his educated nose quivered.

It was the customs woman who actually barked at him.

“Sir!”

Everything stopped. Other passengers turned around to stare at him—a teen with backpack, a family of four lugging loot from Disneyland, an elderly couple attempting to catch up with the rest of their tour group. Another customs officer began walking over from further down the terminal.

“Sir!” the customs woman repeated.

“Yes?” Paul felt as if he’d left his own body. As if he were looking down on this ridiculous if horrifying confrontation, which could only end with Paul Breidbart being led away in handcuffs. And disgrace.

“Sir. Please refrain from petting the dog, sir.”

“What?”

“She’s not a pet, sir. She’s a working animal.”

“Yes, of course. Sorry.” He took his hand away—it was clearly shaking.

Paul turned and walked toward the sign that said Baggage This Way. He silently counted his steps, thinking if he made it to ten, he would have gotten away with it.

He made it to eleven.

Twelve.

Thirteen.

The dog hadn’t smelled the cocaine. He was okay.