ENTERPRISE
No-one can follow such a life-changing career without causing suspicion in their peers. By the time he was nineteen years old, Johnny's trial sentenced a sarcastic emphasis. The vagaries of his career were broad and directionless. Over the next two years he lost the vision which had led him to the uniform in the first place. It was true that he had gone to England seeking any way of finding world travel. He sought the places that he had until then only dreamed about. But when he got there he found that he was a hired gun to solve other peoples’ problems. In so doing, he had brought onto himself all the world leaders' sins. Also the anger of the best part of the global population. The ultimatum had gone through. He had seen the Old Continent with a glimpse from a covered wagon. From behind wind shield glass he'd become witness to life in all its depravity. There is a rhyme about the futility of such an exercise. He had experienced the meaning of it with bitterness.
It goes something like this, ‘If you are Hungary then you would be Russian away to join the Army. Remember to be germane or else they would tie you to a pole and thrash you. If you are a roaming maniac, you might get to pick up your check in Slovakia. By the end of all that, you would be war sore and bulging hairier.’
His mother only wanted the best for him. She paid for his year’s studentship at her art school, and he began carrying paper and pencil. He found the social network amongst the eccentrics there difficult to manage. Half way through the year he walked into the local police station and asked them for a real job and a uniform.
They set him out the same day in a shirt and hat. He went back to the art school. He collected from handbag and pocket their contraband grass and crystals. Even licensed pharmaceuticals that the students and their teachers carried and used daily. He considered pipes and cigarettes fair game. It was part of his efforts to rid the neighbourhood of bohemians. He even took the wine from the shelf at the cafe and delivered them all to the cops. After many months of this strategy he and his fellow bobbies had amassed a clutch of chemicals. They stored it in the basement of a house in Triangle. Its estimated resale street value summed up to one and a half million dollars. It was all loaded onto a truck and destroyed in a putrid fire at the end of the operation. The purpose of the effort kept the streets clean and safe. At least satisfied a common interpretation of what the law was for.
He had a girlfriend on the force. She was smallest height that regulations required. A blonde. She would tell him that he must do as she said at all times to the smallest detail in attitude and action. Because she was the law. He put up with her churlish temper for only three weeks until he moved in to a secretary’s apartment. She was a call processor for the emergency line. This lady was more considerate and taller than his first girlfriend, and she was a brunette. He bought a fax machine and hooked it into her phone line. In this way he could receive his daily orders from central control.
At six am. on the first six days of each week a hand written single line command came in for him. Its intent and meaning was so absurd. Strange enough to make him believe that it was an accident. The commands read like a juvenile fantasy role playing game master's words. This rather than a ranking officer. Daily the demands on him were such that he must slay an undead vampire and kill the werewolf in an alleyway. Or open all the coffins and check for signs of life and catch the fairies as they swoop. The Law is a serious job, but he could not interpret the orders he received. It would have been more suited to a childminders scary story than peace keeping work. He was not a church minister, and had no special skills with which to intercept phantoms. He never met his commanding officer.
He stored up the strange fax orders one by one in the secretary’s apartment. He had an intention of bringing them all back into the station at monthly accounting. To ask for a reasonable explanation for them. Until one night he came back from the beat and found his shoes pillow and pyjamas in a box on the pavement there. She had dumped him and he had no particular place to go. The paper fax pages ripped and thrown in an illegible pile in her outside rubbish bin. He could get no compensation and his job stymied for the foreseeable future.
There was his haunting memory of the previous year’s territorial adventure. This irked him as much as it seized his reason. He wondered what he could say to others about it, and so one day he called the army office. He asked the receptionist what he could say about a nuclear war. After a pause a new voice came to the line and gave the answer, “You can’t say anything. You can’t say anything at all.” This denial left him in the same mental conundrum as he was at the out start. His confounded mental state continued. He once had in his orders responsibility for the existence of the planet. Yet nobody he knew spared him the time to give belief to his story.
He began to feel nostalgic for the old friends he had left behind two years previous. He caught up with some of them and drank the beer they enjoyed at their parties. Discussed career options. Considering the short shrift, he had received from his first two postings, he had an option. He could complete the year’s art school training. He also put out a missing person’s report about a girl he once knew. Her name was Diana, and she was a teenager. The cops came back to him with a story. They told him that she was living in Wellington in an outer suburb there, and had a child. They claimed over the phone that he was the father. A date made for her and her brother and father to visit him.
She arrived, and he had not seen her for four years. She was the same waif as she had been then, with her vague comments and glazed over eyes. Her brother was a shaved headed man with tattoos and wearing denim and boots. Her father seemed to be the only worthwhile person in the entourage. He was a well off and busy carpenter who made blunt and off the cuff remarks. He said that Johnny was the mystery man who had decided to show himself at last. John replied that he had not known that Diana had a son. The first he had heard of it was when the police had spoken to him. He demanded that a medical paternity test made for him and the boy and mother. Barry, her father, said that it sounded like a set up. He agreed and criticized the aloof way they had remained absent and unheard of for four years.
It was the boy who disturbed Johnny. He was silent and unflinching. He could not eat or walk unless his family manipulated him by manual hand. The boy did not try anything. They pushed him and lifted his arms for him while he said nothing nor even changed his blank expression. It was as though he was brain damaged. When Johnny asked the family what the problem was with the boy, they told him to mind his own business.
The blood type test returned positive; there was a chance that he was the father. This left him with the undesirable task of minding a silent and stupid child. Whom at the age of four could not perform simple acts. He checked the skin of the boy and saw all down his arms and parts of his legs, small scars. He asked a nurse what could have made them and she replied, ‘needles.’ It seemed that the lad had been a victim of a junky family who did not care about children and their safety and future. Diana’s skinhead brother had taken to parking in a white Valiant with his mates outside his address. He called out threats while smoking and drinking. John got into the car one day. He saw that they were also using syringes beneath the level of the doors. There passers-by could not otherwise see them do it.
He gave the child back to his mother, telling her that he wasn’t going to allow her pull him into a criminal ring. He'd avoid her and her family. She complained, saying that she wished that she had never met him. He capitulated in agreement likewise. His life at home was quiet and ordinary again until one day a man arrived at the front steps.
He dressed in black overalls and gloves, boots and a helmet which hid his face. Obvious the man did not want recognition. He said something which stunned Johnny with its strange idiom. It was, “Kill the Prime Minister or I’ll take your son’s life.” Johnny did not know how to react to this. He could not see who he was nor did he recognize the uniform as an official military one. It was more like a surplus bought shambles. Tied and strung and polished up to make it look worthwhile. Whoever the creep was, he must have been a criminal or else half insane. He walked up the front steps past Johnny and entered the house through the door. The way he did it was both like stalking and storming, but the man was laughing inside his motorbike helmet. He could have been anybody. A man in his family, or the new family he had met, or a confused member of the public.
John sat silent there on the steps. He panicked, as he had done for a year since returning from the ghastly army trip. He laughed and stared straight ahead.
The horror of it all was that the plot extorted so much. So much so that it became drawn out and happened to a bad extent. In the end they left him without a son to call his own. The criminal in his gawky motorbike suit was never taken out and caught. The police never believed him each time he went to them for help and defence. The Prime Minister was not assassinated even though Johnny ended up kneeling as a sniper. Wearing black on the battlements of a building one night as the PM. rode past in a car. The driver of the train which collided with the poor boy’s body needed to take stress leave. John and his father and aunty stood on the tracks after the accident looking down at the once living person. He never spoke to Diana again. Barry avoided him and the police disbelieved everything he said. A strange sniper’s rifle equipped with a clumsy Japanese built bullet rather than an Israeli one. It became discarded over a garden wall in the dark somewhere in Eston, and Johnny lost a capacity to love. His angry step father disrespected him and his mother said that it was all a pity.
He had some desire to leave behind his morbid country and find a place in the sun.
He had written a book about his viewpoints on the European world. It was as he saw it from within the confines of the military. It had extended to comment on America. It touched on politics. He found a publisher for it, which thrilled him. They paid him a small proportion of funds from its proceeding sales. What was more exiting for him than all that success was that it had the mark and class of ‘Nihil Obstat’. This Latin term connoted that everything in it was a fact and beyond objection. It even read that Jean Paul the Second had given the book this title. After a nine-month period thirty thousand dollars’ worth of sales had accrued in a bank account. This transferred onto a master card which his father handed to him one afternoon.
So since all his bridges burned in his own country he bought a ticket to Los Angeles. From his step father’s care one day he said to Greyson, “I may be gone some time.” As he was walking past the people of his small home city, while he was carrying a night bag. A taxi driver swooped well into place at the right time. He stepped into it and he instructed the driver to take him to the airport.
He arrived in time to board the plane. He was the last passenger to walk through the gantry entrance. He greeted the stewardess. He explained a little of his story to her. He told her that his son was dead and he did not have anything to live for in his home country. He sought his fortunes in the United States. She told him that he could get his immigration papers when he got there. He went into the airplane. He took a seat at the rear and breathed a sigh of grief and relief.
The plane got to LAX terminal after a flight through the night. Riflemen apprehended the flight mid-air. The hijackers deliberated their actions. It seemed to him that passengers were at unforeseen intervals disappearing. Grease extruded into the cabin finishing from some metal joints inside the hull. The plane flew at a purposeful low altitude, and arrived on the runway in a broken condition. Entire panels had peeled and flown off from the frame of the plane. Johnny at last admitted a spoken word. It was an utterance, but it was enough to allow the hostess to chide him.
As the jets screamed to a halt he felt new hope. The bounce of wheels brought the last remaining travellers rocking in their belts. The madness of the night flight calmed to a kind of sanity. The flash of orange lights which had been visible through windows had ensured him that he had landed.
He walked through the gates of the airport at Los Angeles. Replied to the counter officers' question that he was not a criminal. Customs replied with a welcome. He went to the trans-continental bus terminal and stepped aboard with a ticket and his carry bag. For twelve days it drove him across the States and into New York again. He alighted at a city junction and went to a diner for a meal.
Before he had left home he had booked a job to clean streets in Stuyvesant Park. The newspaper he had got the first contact for this was the Melbourne Press, which he had posted to him. After telephone calls and visits to the home American embassy he had a visa. This permitted the sketchy arrangements which he was now acting out.
At the diner he bought a copy of The New York Times. A man who had been watching him from within a group of home boys called out to him and then came over and spoke to him. He had said that Johnny was in deep cover. That he had seen that type before. But then when he watched him eat, it appeared he also wanted to be a local. First meetings can define the rest of the stay.
He said to Johnny, “That’s not the paper you want or even need, man. You should go to the stand across the street and get a smaller bulletin. Get four of them, in fact. Get the Wall Street Review, the Accommodation List, the Diner and the Village Voice. Read them and they’ll get you oriented. You need a place to stay.” Johnny said ‘right okay,’ and as he stood to leave he got told to wash his plate. The other man then took his copy of The Times for his own. When Johnny went into the diner and washed his plate the manager told him that he did not need to. The chef said, ‘See you later mate’.
Newspaper stands in New York City are demanding stores. This is so if you do not have exactly the correct cash with which to pay for the news. The money has to be clean and have no past black market history to it. Johnny had not changed his native money into U.S. currency until the bus had reached half way across the States. He paid a ten dollar note for six different newspapers and walked away. The vendor recognized the note as having come from a different state. He ended up at a reading cafe. He read the lists in accommodation offered.
A sixteen level apartment block had a vacant room on level six. Such a medium level would not have made him afraid of heights, number six. The incessant howl of the city was already frustrating his sensitivities. He circled the advertisement type. Turning around, he saw a young lady watch him from a phone booth. He wanted to use the telephone and then a taxi. Another lady called out to him from the passenger seat of a car close by.
“Get in. Get in bad boy or you never know what could happen to yourself if you can’t.” She swung the door open. He checked for safety with a look around at the persons inside. On a moment he stepped on inside this private mystery ride. The first time he had been in Manhattan, he had had car rides, but not like this one. The ladies drove him around and talked with him to sass him out. By the time the afternoon was over, he had asserted his right not to blow street drugs. As well as his decision not to carry a gun or lie in the gutter. They dropped him off by the door of the apartment on the Lower East Side. He still had the small line ad for accommodation.
He walked in to see the manager. This man occupied a booth behind a desk in the wall. He showed him his wallet then the entry stamp on his visa. After some negotiation he paid and followed the manager. They went up the stairs to level six. Along a corridor with grimy patterned wallpaper and red painted doors. The manager pushed the door hard to get it open.
The room inside had the bed and he allowed him a rest on it. He could use the sink. He could come and go. He had achieved it. The manager loaned him the door key. When he handed the key over they shook hands. Johnny promised and the other man said that Johnny didn’t know what he was talking about around there. Then the manager returned along the corridor. He went through the glass wire doors and walked away and down the stairs. Inside the room were a single bed and a sink and a cupboard. It was already occupied by a ginger haired and slender person who slept quiet on the bed.
He said, “Ma’am.” She slept. He cleared his throat in a controlled manner and said again, slight and quieter. “Ma’am.” From behind him a lady said, “Come in.” He turned and saw her standing at another door. He said, “This is my room.” She nodded and said, “That’s hers. You go in there,” and nodded at another door. A lady who wore a green dress and an afro hairstyle stood at another door. She said, “Yeah well what do you want?” Johnny replied “This is my room.” She said, “Yeah well you had better go in or the devil might get you.” Johnny thought about that. Instead of entertaining illogical conversation went into the room and shut the door.
The ginger haired lady was awake by now and said to him, “What do you want? I was asleep.”
He sat in a wooden chair and replied, “I’m sorry for waking you up. But I have made a booking in an apartment, this one. The manager of the building, and I suppose that’s what he is, has shown me this room. This is the ad to prove it.” He pulled the square of newspaper from out of his pocket and read the circled advertisement to her. She pulled it from out of his hands and looked at it.
Slow she said, “Hey that’s my room. But what is this newspaper, you pervert?!” She jumped out of bed and ran out of the room and to the end of the corridor and through the swinging doors. The lady in the green dress with the afro came to the door and said to him, “What’s all this then?” Johnny showed her the newspaper. She looked at it and smiled and said, “Man, you got the wrong address. Yep, this is the apartment, but on the mirror side of the block. That’s the way it is in Stuyvesant Park. You got to go now. We mean it. Be careful. You’ve got the YMCA. You be on the other side. Beat it.”
He walked to the corridor and down the stairs. In the foyer he said to the manager, “What is this?” and handed him the newspaper. The man got onto the telephone and called the paper’s office. After the call he nodded at the newcomer and told him to call a taxi. Johnny went to the coin phone and dialled. Then he went to the counter and paid the manager. He returned the key and collected his duffel bag and walked outside.
He cut a straight trail through the block. All the way to another building on another road which was like the one he was at. He was in the Lower East Side. The building was the same, and he did the same things, and the same things happened. Even the manager dressed the same as the last one, in red shirt and dark blue jeans and large white sand shoes. It went better than the first time. The room number was the same and so was the floor level. The occupant was a sleeping transvestite. She woke up and said quiet, “Hi, let’s get a bottle of wine or vodka or something. That’s alright. Take a seat on my chair. Use the cupboard. Don’t worry about the sleeping bitch across the park, that’s the YMCA. that’s all. They’re always like that, spoil and coarse. They always trick people like that. They’re lazy, and their fathers pay for everything. Close the door for Christ sakes, its freezing.” She had ginger hair and was slender.
During the five weeks that he used the apartment he slept on the floor. He'd lay beneath a thin blanket with his head in the broom cupboard. When he was not inside the room arguing with Alex about whether to drink, he cleaned the streets. He collected a wage from the borough council. With scrubbing broom and acid water, he scrubbed the walls. Then swept and scrubbed the pavements of the Lower East Side. It was a job. The acid etched every virus down into the gutter run in the tunnels beneath the streets. He would start at four forty-five am and finish at eleven. Then he would go to a park and eat a simple sandwich. He rested and sipped vodka in the afternoon and slept at night. He did not go out to party or club.
The five weeks ended when he was late to arrive one morning. He packed up his small kit and picked up his broom and bucket. The many conversations he had had with his roommate ended and he apologized. She burst into tears and said goodbye.
He rode a taxi to Rhodes Island. His driver stopped in an old area of the city. A great grassy valley and a brick church stood in the darkened night. He waited there for a dead spirit to console him. He had taken an idea into his mind. Pope Julius who built the church would one day return to comfort and console the people there.
The basements beneath the concrete cities of New York are wide and dark. They tend to swallow people whole if they stray into them. Persons walked about on the valley where the grass lay dewy and the cathedral loomed silent. They would stop him and tell him the right way to walk. In the same way that roommates would shout directions and advice to him in Manhattan. Caring strangers prevented him from getting lost in a tunnel there. He waited on the cold stone steps of Julius’ church.
Waiting in vain should not continue for an indefinite time. He had a conversation about religion with a man there. Then he hitched his bucket and mop again and walked to an apartment tower block. This was by a complex motorway junction where traffic careened endless. He pressed a bell on an intercom system. It didn't work and he waited. He used the pay phone to call the landlady. She answered and the next day a man with a gun arrived and robbed all his money and let him into the tower block.
He entered penniless and wearing a sweat-stained shirt and cloth trousers and sand-shoes. A swinging door opened and he walked onto thin threaded carpet. He met five lightweight young persons who lay and sat and used the kitchen. A settee and a window and that’s all. There was an alcove kitchen with a stainless steel bench and a kettle and a pot and an element. Over the three days and nights that he lived there they evaded real answers. They baked junk in the kitchen and injected their vessels and called him an alien. He said as little as he felt he should. On the third day he wandered into a bus shelter and rode out to Pennsylvania.
Before he had departed Manhattan in such a desperate state, he had put in some extra time. His boss had dismissed him for not working hard enough at six o’clock one morning. He had panicked a little because of this, but had ensured his survival by extra activities. He had been doing a little extra time at the United Nations building. He walked into their palatial office with its million-dollar marble floor. There answered another ad for secretary. He then ended upstairs listening to radio news broadcasts about politics. The broadcasts came in from all around the world. The juniors listened and wrote on paper with ballpoint pens. Whatever theme it was that they could define from the events. After three weeks of this routine he shuffled down into a cell group of fifteen. They worked on a specific problem. Johnny heard of rumours of wars, and the votes cast on whether that was ethical.
Another process he became involved with was the inorganic collection and recycling unit. Sixteen vans drove throughout five states. They reclaimed all the broken appliances and tools. They brought them to a five-level basement in town. There they reconditioned them for resale. The basement was lit with red illumination which lent it a surreal atmosphere. He cruised around with the people who managed this project for days. It was an insight into society which kept him smart for years to come.
Another thing which he did so that he could survive unemployment. He walked into an Army office off the sidewalk and said hello. A man in a basic uniform said in a rather proud and affected way which also sounded a little scared, “You’re in there now.” He could see that, but was not aware of the full implications of the private’s saying. When the man at the desk talked to him about what he wanted and explained that not all things were possible. By the time he left several things about his near future had altered. Outside on the street again he made a vow to follow the American way. The sergeant standing by the door told him that the world goes round and then it rolls away.
In Pennsylvania he rode on a ferry to a forgotten old area by an island. He saw a constant amount of sea water pouring into a square hole at surface level. The ferry passed this at night. He became depressed from thoughts about imminent world destruction. This was the first time he had become depressed about the subject with awareness. Aboard boat the skipper announced to the passengers what it was. He even quoted the fatality figures from the tragedy which had happened there in 1979. He disembarked ashore and put on a white cloth boiler suit. The passengers who stayed aboard wished him well.
He summoned from within his faith a resolve to stride through an abandoned suburb. The tenacity which he had to maintain was a distress to him. He almost gave in to the desire to turn back before the half way point. He saw silent dwellings where used to live happy families. Flowers adorned wild weeds. Stems twisted and fell back to same place in the dirt from where they had risen. The tenement buildings still had mattresses in them and stained tea cups. Huge black rats scuttled about. He warded them away with a knife.
Where he emerged from the deserted town he met a marine reconnaissance team. By a white post they washed him down with cold water from a tap on a tall pole in the pavement. They took a statement of description from Johnny, wherein he recounted his observations. They checked that he had not removed anything from the area. They took his knife and boiler suit away for destruction. One of the rescue team was a man he had known from a previous year. He was smiling and cared for him. Johnny had seen the inside of the result of such a sad place. He felt like the poor man in a fictional film set in Alaska who patrols in search of his family and sees them. When he sees them he breaks down and shouts, ‘God did this to me.’ The emptiness and loss of the sights inside the area had been eerie.
From Pennsylvania he rode on a bus across country to South Carolina. He zeroed in on a range in the Northern State for some training. He met the captain who knew where he was from. Although he only wanted to join the Army to survive, he was in it now and that’s too bad but let’s get on with things. The training consisted of rescuing red flags. The flags were at the far end of a covered forested camouflage, canopied range. The range had landscape variations in it, such as a gorge and swamp and poisonous ivy. The recruits had ammunition issued. He obtained one red flag and brought it back to the start. But not without throwing a grenade at a competitor. She was climbing a crag beneath and behind him and firing a gun in his direction. When the gunshots stopped at the grenade burst he felt fright. He felt a sense of weird lost victory at silencing the attacker. When he returned to the first line he received reprimand. The captain curtailed his liberties in front of the observers. He had felt nothing emotional against the competitor in sentiment. In fact, he admired her. The chase excited him. Except for a frightened notion that he should defend himself from a toting gunman. The trainer handed him over wrists cuffed to the police.
The police took him in a shuttle bus across the state line into Kentucky and released him. He viewed the quiet streetlights of a village. It was the place where the Beaver Wars waged three centuries ago in French Iroquois country. The streets were tidy and serene. Johnny mused while the authorities waited on the bus for him to see their country. Then he rode to an air terminal and had a simple meal. A Marshal there explained that by the national accounts they could not hold him captive. By military law he used equal force, if only to his moral bankruptcy, but that he had not had a criminal account. When a transit plane arrived he flew in it to Idaho and the plane arrived at dawn. He negotiated a bus ticket to Seattle in Washington. Rode with rough and ready young men who gave a damn for human life. They swore and cursed and praised the Lord in times of trouble. The bruises he had acquired in training were healing when the bus arrived. In his weariness he connected with another Amtrak service. He could go with the most of them to wait behind the yellow lines in the five tunnels. From here to ride north on line seventy-one past Olive Way or to 9th Avenue and Pike Street. Instead he purchased a ticket on a central link to a larger train. It went from Seattle to Bellingham. This gave him a hope of getting all the way to Anchorage.
He slept for a day at the Ketchikan bed and breakfast. His head was heavy from the giddiness of his cross country sojourn. The large steel ferry from Manuska is a pleasure to travel on. He watched low cloud descending on forested mountainside. Shoreline rose for mile after mile from the low rolling sea.
Johnny walked into the city of Anchorage by following the tracks. He met the homeless. They huddled in their tents and tended their gas kitchens. He heard them put their cups down onto pottery plates and saw them come towards him. Pleads for monetary donation or for any medication he might have spare. He had no medication but gave some of his money away. When the yellow and black train arrived all steel and massive and straight he got aboard. When he was aboard, a man criticized him for not having given all his money away.
A man sat across from him on a booth seat while the train waited, stalled in place. They started talking to each other. He asked Johnny where he was from and what he was doing there and where he thought he was going. He was a clean cut young man named Lewis. On the subject of the homeless at the station, Lewis scolded him for being selfish. John said that he still would need some money for himself. John needed to eat also. What could one man do?
Lewis asked what his plans were for doing when he would get to Fairbanks. John replied that he did not know. He was looking for an opportunity.
He found a casual arrangement to test equipment for an outdoors company. The Iditarod dog sled race takes as much strength and cunning as a high altitude mountain climb. Mackinac wanted their new body shell suits tested under stress. The race would begin in the following month of March. It provided an opportunity to test the body shell suit. This year the race had an even number of entrants. For this reason, it travelled northward.
He trekked with a sled and three huskies across snow fields from the route’s starting place. Past the first marker point at the Campbell airstrip and to Willow. Along a woody and white trail which he could discern only by astute estimation. Five days of running and pushing and calling the dogs tuned him into a world owned by wolves. Packs howled at night around their quarry. Measured ricochets off the sides of trees from a Seiko rifle warded them away. His huskies, for which he had not trained how to control, became unhappy at his tutelage. They broke free on the third day.
He lightened the sled of anything heavy. He towed it from straps to his own shoulders. Up around a hillside with wind fallen trees. Through the spaces in the forest which afforded a passing. When he came to area 907 at the settlement of Willow, he was at the race’s restart line. He was happy to resign in front of the laughter of the people who watched him stagger across the line. He reported that the body shell suits work well, and told his employer where he stacked the spare gear. The dogs wandered back to safety a day later.
With this his last payment from the US. he shared a long-distance ride in a car with a hardened survivor. He did not have the patience for ferries and trains now. He felt his holiday had neared an end in his imaginings of the free world and what is has to offer. He knew his family missed him and fretted for his safety and he wished to prove it to them that he was still alright. He paid the owner of the car a five-hundred-dollar fee to be his passenger. The Cadillac coped with the Seward highway with ease. Since a previous car accident, the driver Harold would take nothing to chance. He was a stable man in charge, never missing a beat. What was remarkable about him was that his left arm was a replacement body part. Harold did not like the formless dull plastic look of his first replacement. So he had paid the doctors to fashion him one with aluminium casing. It shone like a robot as it clutched the wheel for sixty hours. They stopped once for a comfort rest and talked about card games.
The city of the Seven Valleys is a fast and dodgy place. Drug dealers and detectives stand on every corner opposite. They stare each other down and shuffle behind dark glasses and long hair. Shaved men carry guns in the streets of San Francisco. Johnny ran between the trams that rush at fast pace on the hills. He felt confusion and knew he must leave America. He had seen his last employment. He must endure first a night homeless sleeping hard on Ashbury Street under a blanket. During the night he expressed his needs with an Hispanic stranger.
"My visa expires tomorrow. I have to leave," Johnny said.
"Yes, you leave. Where are you going to go?" the stranger said.
"Back to my country, if I can get there."
"The USA is the world. There are no other places."
"How can I leave?"
"Find the doorway that's painted black. There's a detective there. Ask him."
In the morning he followed the advice. He walked to the entrance of a detective’s door way all painted black. A man was standing in the entrance inside the door. He had his finger pointed upward in declaration. He was stating that he and rest of the front lines were sick of the new homeless alien. They had already busted him for a fatality. Considerations were being made to jail him to remove the problem. In a desperate action for survival, Johnny raised his hand. He smacked the unknown man across the back of his head.
The cop turned around and saw that it was him. “So you’ve now gone and assaulted an American officer,” he said to his fellows behind him, “See what I mean? The city has had these naive visitors before. That’s alright, I don’t care, because he didn’t use a firearm.”
“You have a last warning catch a taxi to our airport and leave for good. Here’s the cash. Go,” the cop said to Johnny.
He handed the young man a hundred and twenty-five dollars. John walked to a taxi rink across the street. He asked the driver to take him to the nearest international airport. The driver said that there was only one and took him there.
