“Oh, the man with a headband?” she said. “He is one of – them. The freedom-pursuers. Have you ever heard of a place called Port Aroma, the state with no government?”
Out of startlement, I hesitated for a moment, wondering if it’s all right to reveal my identity, and finally decided it’s unnecessary to lie to her. “Well, yes. I’m actually quite familiar with that place.”
With an anxious visage emerging, she gave me a suspicious look and mumbled, “You’re from the Port?”
“Well, yes—”
“Are you one of them?” she interrupted.
“No, of course not. Honestly, I am not a fan of them, not at all. It’s now that they are in control of everything in the Port, leaving is the only option left for those who don’t support them. And that’s why I have traveled so far just to get here, a country with a strong government, isn’t it?”
“Pretty strong when it comes down to hunting down dissidents,” she said ironically, her gaze of suspicion tapering off. “But, yeah, the government here hates them, purely because they like to voice out their thoughts, which is, I guess, has been declared illegal. But the situation has only deteriorated after the news of the dissolution of government in the Port spread out widely here. Many people took it to the streets and chanted, demanding election reforms, and most of them ended up being rounded up and imprisoned while some of them got killed in a way similar to what you’ve just witnessed.”
“Great, that explains everything, though I think they have gone too far by beating him to death.” As my voice faded, her face turned pale in a second, and she frenziedly motioned me to stop speaking, as though she had had enough of what I was saying.
And I whispered when she stopped making all those weird gestures after a few seconds, “Did I say something wrong?”
She didn’t say a word and had her watery eyes narrowed in consternation as she kept staring at the floor with a somber look, which appeared to be portending something as bad as the atrocity I had just seen, and just by the thought of it, there was a drastic surge of adrenaline that paralyzed me happening in my body when an awkward ambiance of silence that wasn’t there before was springing up.
Whiffs of nervousness then inundated the atmosphere, and as huge beads of perspiration dribbled across my forehead down to my eyebrows, she finally looked up at me, puffed out a short breath as if she had been holding her breath the whole time and shattered the intolerable silence, “They are everywhere. You have to be very careful the next time you talk about them or the government, especially in such a disapproving way.”
“Disapproving!?”
“Yes, you said they have gone too far.”
“Is it illegal to say that? And what do you mean they’re everywhere?”
“It’s not illegal, but as I’ve told you, you won’t be fond of what they will do to you if they overhear it. Now turn around,” she said, leaned close to me and whispered in my ears, as I turned around. “There. See the man surrounded by several ranks of armed guards stepping out of the main entrance? The man wearing an old-fashioned red coat. He is the Chief of Police. Don’t you see? They’re everywhere.”
I turned to face her again. “But I haven’t done anything wrong, plus I’m not a freedom-pursuer, nor am I a citizen of this country.”
“In this place, you don’t have to be starting a revolution to be imprisoned,” she threatened in her coarse tone of voice, emphasizing the last word, and that’s when I first realized she didn’t have that slurring accent when she spoke.
And she seemed to be very aware of how things worked in this place, thus I surmised, “You must be one of them.”
Out of the blue, “OH! What!? NO! I’m not! What?” she raged and scowled at me sullenly.
“Why—”
“Go away! I don’t want to see your face! Go away from me, you idiot!” she said, as two cascades of tears rolled off of her eyes.
I was utterly bewildered about why she was suddenly so upset and was at a loss for words. It was apparent she had misunderstood something I had just said but I was clueless about what it was. Of course, now that I have already asked her why she was suddenly so angry with me at that time, I know that she was just pretending to be furious. She just wanted me to walk out of the arrival hall so that Kaylen could find me and pick me up. And when she was explaining this to me, she sounded like it’s just some trivial matters that she could barely remember. But to me, it’s something I’d never forget.
“Get out of my sight! Now!” she then barked firmly.
And it dawned on me it was better to give her space to cool off, so I tottered away and headed for the exit clumsily. Then as I planted my foot on the pavement outside, I shielded my face again, then moved to the edge of the street – carefully stepped around that puddle of blood – and looked for a cab, which was supposed to have a sharp yellow color for easy recognition, and waved at the cabs among a group of vehicles as they swooped by loudly. I remember half of them were cabs, but none pulled over no matter how hard I flailed my arms. I bet they ignored me on purpose. People there really had a tendency to disregard everything.
After five further minutes of incessant waving, I grew so frustrated that I had to curb my urge of rushing out to the road to stop a cab driven by a man wearing sunglasses by striking the back of my head. Just a moment before I was about to give up, a seven-passenger, two-door silver vehicle that appeared to be some sort of an extravagant limousine came to a stop right in front of me, and then the man sitting behind the wheel waved at me and said, with the window lowered all the way down, “Hey, need a taxi?”
It looked very much like a sophisticated swindle when every official cabs were paying no heed to you but an unknown car approached, maybe he wanted to lure me into his vehicle and rob me, but after weighting up the situation, knowing there was almost no access to the internet and the only person who spoke English in this place wouldn’t want to talk to me again, I decided to take the risk and answered, “I need to go to a hotel.”
“Which hotel? There are hundreds, if not thousands, in this city!” the driver exclaimed, sticking his head out the window with a trustworthy, subtly amiable beam, and I thought he must be someone’s good father.
“I don’t know. I just need a place to stay for the night,” I said, sizing him up as one of those criminals I occasionally heard about from the radio. “But do you have a taxi license?”
Tall and a bit rotund, with squinty, beady black eyes, glinting with honesty, and a flat nose, somehow he had already gained my trust with his signature smiley face when I first laid eyes on him. And I guessed I just asked it to make myself look smarter.
“A license!? It’s the last thing I would like to have. You honestly think a licensed cab would stop by just because you tried to flag it down? You must be kidding me.”
What he was trying to say seemed strange, yet, judging from what I had seen in this country so far, I bet he was being honest with me. So, found myself at a loss for words again, I rolled my eyes and simply nodded.
“Hop in,” the driver said and drew his head back, and I gladly hopped into the back seat, which had a spongy leather car seat, with my suitcase. “So, Golden Hotel? What do you think?”
“What do you think?” I said, my eyes automatically fixated upon a cumbersome-looking photo pendant that was reminiscent of some kind of an ancient metallic pocket watch that had a long attached chain, dangling from the rear view mirror, with the clean metal flip cover open, yet the dangling motion, which absorbed my gaze at first, prevented me from taking a glimpse at what’s inside clearly.