The Red Dragon: A Study in Madness While Being Stuck in Customs
by Evan
It smelled of puke, because there was puke, lots of it. It was being blown into the only receptacle available to Xian Customs: a trashcan, half-filled with discarded ’Lychee Candy’ wrappers and cans of Kěkǒukělè. A female customs agent watched us, careless of the smell or condition of the person vomiting up what food poisoning brewed of the day’s breakfast and lunch, as she stood at the doorway of our room like a prison guard wishing we were hatching an escape so she could finally see some action. Another round of intestines being squeezed of its halfway-digested food and sent spelunking into the trashcan that’s being cradled like a priest’s bible during an exorcism and yet another layer of putrid smell is laid down onto the ever-thickening atmosphere of our room that was growing colder by the minute. This room would be forever known to Vanessa and I as “The Icebox.”
I said to the female agent: “Is there any way to warm it up in here?”
…
“When…will…the…Airline Stooge…from…Sichuan Airlines…be…back?”
…
“Do you have internet so I can use Google translate and tell you what I just said in Chinese?”
…
Before imprisonment in The Icebox, before the granite-faced guard trying to suffocate the last ounce of humanity from her soul as she she watched us with disdain as we froze, before the puke, there was this:
“Hello, ladies and gentleman, this is your captain speaking. Due to weather (SMOOOOOOOOOOOOOG), we will not be able to land at Changdu. We are diverting the plane and will be landing in Xian in about 30 minutes.” Click.
The stewardess informed us that the airline would hold us up at a hotel for the night and then figure out a new flight to Phoenix (layover before Mexico).
“Thirty minutes” (an hour) later and we land in Xian.
Mark the time: 1am. We’re standing in line at customs and when we finally make it to an agent he says something in Chinese. We explained the situation about being diverted. He tells us using a series of hand-motions that we need to wait in a designated waiting area. He holds on to our passports and passes them off to some boss, then they’re passed off to another boss, and so on until they disappear (forever?). The minutes go by and every single one of the passengers on our flight stroll past us in the waiting area and on to their comfy hotel stay.
Mark the time: 2am. Customs is empty save for Vanessa and I and a few agents walking around, shuffling paperwork at a desk; trying to look busy at 2am. Vanessa and I, as the minutes continue to go by like they’re struggling to walk through a swamp of knee-deep mud, plead…beg…for an answer. Every cuss word in the English language (even a few in French) has been practically shouted to the Heavens! What the fuck is going on?! And for an entire hour we were ignored. We were paupers trying to get the attention of some royalty as they strolled down a cobblestone street paying us no mind. Filthy, beggars! Be gone!
Mark the time: 2:30am. Finally, mercifully, an agent that speaks a bit of English approaches along with a rep from the airline. “Him from airline,” said the agent of the rep. “He help you.” (I’m not being racist; I’m not picturing Mickey Rooney from Breakfast at Tiffany’s when I recall this conversation. This is how I remember it to the best of my muddy recollection and that is what he sounded like). Airline Stooge: “You cannot leave.”
“China?!”
“Customs.”
“Why?”
He more or less explained that because our layover in Changdu was only eight hours and we didn’t get a visa (because there wasn’t a need for one), they couldn’t let us “into the country” after our plane had been diverted and our stay in China forcibly extended. “Into the country” meaning into the airport, anywhere out of customs.
“What about our bags?” I asked him.
“They go to Changdu.”
“With us?”
“…Maybe. If we get you flight.”
Vanessa: “I’m not feeling so good…”
Mark the time: 3am. The Icebox: Vanessa is huddled over an empty trashcan, feeling queasy. I’m talking with a customs agent, the one that speaks the best English. “My wife is sick. Is there any way to get her into another room that isn’t meant to keep beef shoulders cold?”
The agent, smiling: “No.”
“Please. There has to be another room somewhere.”
He just laughed: “Hahahahaha. No.”
I repeated, accentuating every syllable thinking it’ll help him understand somehow: “There has to be another room. My wife is sick, if you couldn’t hear it or smell it already.” I pointed to Vanessa heaving into the trashcan.
“Hahaha.” Then, with a wave of a hand, he motioned to the room next door. I opened the door and saw…a padded room, set to the same frigid temperature as The Icebox. The floor though, wasn’t padded.
“Why isn’t the floor padded?” I asked the agent.
He just shrugged.
“I mean, if someone crazy wanted to kill themselves in here, couldn’t they just hit their heads against the floor?”
Another shrug.
I mocked his shrug and said: “The Icebox it is… But, bathroom first?”
I did what we all do in the bathroom: pretended to take a leak but cried tears into the toilet bowl.
“Wanna give me a shake, dipshit?” I asked the agent waiting for me right outside of my stall.
“Yes.”
“What?” I peeped through the crack of the stall, seeing if he had any idea what I said, and thankfully he did not.
Mark the time: 4am. Back to where the story started. Still no idea what’s happening. The Airline Stooge mentioned trying to help us get on another flight to Changdu a few hours ago. We’ve heard nothing since. Not a peep. None of the agents around us spoke English so I busied myself by trying to win at a staring contest with the stone-faced agent guarding the door as I held Vanessa’s hair back. Not even the slightest turn of one corner of her mouth. Steel.
Mark the time: 5am. The cold inside The Icebox starts to feel like I’m being frozen by Xian customs to preserve American specimens for research, or for a study in madness. How have they lasted this long? I wonder, says the lead scientist. Mark the time: 5am. ‘Four hours in Cryo-Chamber and still alive. Not one ounce of information given to them about their predicament and what’s to happen next. Remarkable. I kept picturing all those people on our flight asleep in cozy beds, dreaming like babes of frolicking through any of a number of warm climates, free as birds. Those bastards.
Alright, Chinese Ashton Kutcher, now’s the time to come springing out and yelling ‘You’ve been 刺!’
“Hey, Terminator 2 Linda Hamilton, go get the Airport Stooge,” I told the female agent guarding us, The Dangerous Prisoners of Xian Customs. I knew she didn’t speak any English, but my frost-bitten mind denied me the kind of recognitive power that God gave the Blue-Footed Booby (and look where they ended up). “Get the Airport Stooge!”
Steel.
“Dammit! Get the damn Airport Stooge!” Vanessa interrupted with a forceful shout before I could repeat basically what she said as she dropped the trashcan that’s been filled up to the halfway point. If there was a mirror, I imagine we must’ve looked like monsters—pale, dark-circles-around-the-eyes, puke-breathed, abominable monsters. Defeated, we sat back down and continued in our Freezing to Death…
Mark the time: 7am. Nothing’s changed. We’re still suspended in a time-looped nightmare. Hallucinations began, slipping in and out of consciousness as we’re hugged harder and harder by the freezing touch of impending death seeping from the vents above us. That’s right, it says with a hiss, you’re almost mine.
I turn to Vanessa, and she turns to me, very slowly, and I say to her: “I just want you to know, that if we die in here, I’m glad you’ll be by my side.” I take her hand in mine, thinking I could warm it up, but realizing my hand was just as cold.
“…Shut up.”
“Hello?” We knew that voice coming from the doorway behind us; the Airline Stooge.
We turn and look at him. He looks at us like he stumbled on a crime scene and both dead bodies had suddenly come back to life. “Uhhhh, here your new flight.”
The flight was leaving in thirty minutes…from the other side of the airport, headed for a layover in Hangzhou and then off to Phoenix.
“What about our bags still going to Changdu?”
“So sorry.”
“That’s it? So sorry?”
“Yes. So sorry.”
After stumbling through the airport like a pair of half-dead/half-drunk dogs going through some agility competition at the Westminster Kennel Club, we barely made it to our flight.
I have to hand it to the Chinese, they are a resilient folk; seeing the density of the smog layer hanging over Xian as we flew away made me think: There’s no way a human being could live in that. (Applause). I pictured myself struggling to breath like an astronaut on Mars after having his helmet struck by some small projectile from space, cracking it open and sending in the carbon dioxide, my eyes bugging out like Schwarzenegger’s in Total Recall.
Mark the time: 8am. We waved goodbye to Xian, China’s cruel mistress sent to make our one and only time with The Red Dragon a time we’ll never forget, no matter how hard we try.