2.19 God Bless

After hanging up the phone, I rode over to the American Consulate.

It was literally a stone's throw away, on the periphery of Ôhori Park, built on some of the most expensive residential real estate in the Fukuoka. To the victors, as they say, go the spoils of war.

Just as I was about to park my bicycle near the front gates of the consulate, a police officer loped towards me with a long nightstick, causing me to nearly jumped out of my skin.

“No park bicycle here,” he shooed me away in broken English.

Halfway down the block another police office waved at me.

I pushed the bike towards the other officer who directed me to a visitor’s parking area around the corner. Leaving the bike there, I walked back to the entrance where an old guard was encased in a bulletproof glass box, like the boy in the glass bubble.

I tried to open the door, but it was lock. The old guard pointed to the door and mouthed something.

“What?”

He made a poking gesture with his finger.

“Whad’ya want me to do, old man?” I said to the guard. “Oh, I get it!”

There was an intercom with a button.

Pressing the button, I asked him in Japanese if he'd let me talk with someone in the consulate.

“Who do you want to talk to?”

“Anyone.”

The door buzzed, and I reached for the handle to open it. It was like trying to roll a boulder away from the entrance of a tomb.

In the five or so years since I had last been to the consulate, security had been beefed up considerably. Where there might have been one or two officers dressed like ordinary beat cops milling about the entrance before, there were now half a dozen cops in riot gear, standing sentry around the premises.

It had never been like that before: in the past you could pop right in whenever you felt like it and bullshit with the diplomats working there. Since 9-11, however, the State Department had turned the place into Fort Knox.

Once inside the bulletproof box, I told the guard that I needed to discuss a legal matter with the consular staff.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No.”

He sucked air through his teeth and said it might be difficult. That was the last thing I wanted to hear. 

“I assure you this is an emergency.”

The guard made a call and relayed the little I had told him. Hanging up the phone, he told to put my bag and other items on a tray. These were passed through an x-ray machine. I was then instructed to walk through a metal detector.

Only once I had leapt through the flaming loops of American vigilance was I allowed to pass through a second heavy door and onto the grounds of the consulate.

The consular building itself was set back off the road, beyond a well-manicured Japanese garden with a rivulet of water flowing through it. There was yet one more set of bombproof doors to be buzzed through before I was able to talk to a frail looking Japanese spinster quailing behind another wall of bulletproof glass.

Christ, these people are preparing for Armageddon.

The woman asked me to take a seat, which I did, sitting across from a pair of large photographs of two of the most dangerous people in the world: President George W. Bush and his toady, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The two of them looked down upon me with shit-eating grins.

Two more years. Two more years.

I waited a good thirty minutes, until a barrel-shaped middle-aged Japanese woman came out to talk to me at last. She introduced herself as Ms. Satô.

I told the woman my story in brief and beseeched her for the consulate’s help. Ms. Satô took some notes as I spoke, and, when I had finished, confided that my timing couldn't be worse: most of the consular staff were away from the office, busy packing up their things. Transfers were conducted in July and the new appointees wouldn't be arriving for several days.

After telling me to wait a little longer, Mrs. Satô went back through a thick, clear door, made of kryptonite most likely, where I could see her talk to a tall, balding man in a pink polo shirt. The man glanced briefly my way, and shook his head. Gesturing to his watch, he dismissed himself. A moment later, the woman emerged from the inner sanctum.

"You are American, aren't you?" she asked.

"Would I be here if I weren't?"

"Ah, yes, I don't suppose you would. It's just that Mr. Barker, the consul-general, asked me to check. Do you have some ID, your passport for example, with you?"

“No,” I said. “The police confiscated it.”

She then explained that there wasn't anything they could do for me now, but as a consolation sorts, she handed me a thin print-out published by the State Department: Guidelines for Americans Arrested in Japan.

God bless, the fucking U.S of A.

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No. 6 is now available on Kindle.