Kafka in Miami*

First you land in Miami, which is flat and lit up like a Christmas tree. No, wait, it is a Christmas tree, a premature illumination of the season.

Then you debouch from the covered gangway to Gate D20, which is about 1 mile as the crow flies from Passport Control. But you are not a crow and crows are not allowed inside the Miami Airport. This is a shame.
You walk 500 yards along beige carpeting between beige walls. Every 100 yards there is a sign indicating, by an arrow, that Passport Control is ahead. You expect to arrive there momentarily, and in order to be prepared, you remove your passport and customs declaration from your handbag. At the end of the passage you follow the arrows that indicate a right turn. Another right turns comes upon you rather quickly, and then you take a two-story escalator up. You step off the escalator with a spring in your step. Two hundred yards ahead is the longest moving sidewalk you have ever seen. You walk briskly along the moving sidewalk because you want to arrive at Passport Control in time to make your connection to New York. The moving sidewalk deposits you back on the beige carpeting. The signs continue to indicate the imminent location of Passport Control. You turn left and there is another escalator. This one goes down. It goes down a long way but you cannot say for sure exactly how long a way. After you are spewed by this elevator you follow the signs to the SkyTrain. In scrolling neon letters, you read: In 48, no 47 seconds, the SkyTrain will arrive.
You board the SkyTrain and hold onto a moist metal pole. The dark glass doors slide shut. You notice birds singing. You realize that birdsongs are being piped into the SkyTrain. After each 30-second trill or warble, the birds are identified in English and Spanish. The voice of the English identifier is a female with a vaguely Southern accent: “You have been listening to the mating song of the Pink-bellied Honduran Fruitbird. Mere seconds before inserting his avian penis into the female’s avian vagina, the male pink-bellied Honduran Fruitbird puffs out his eponymous belly and sings this melodious tune.” The same identification is then made in Spanish, but the speaker is a lisping male. The next birdsong belongs to the Hare-Lipped Bougainvillea Bird, and resembles a kazoo. The duration of your SkyTrain journey is thirteen birdsongs. Upon exiting the train via the doors opposite the doors by which you entered, you continue to follow the signs to Passport Control.
It is now tomorrow.
Up ahead you make a sharp left and encounter a moving sidewalk, which is twice as long as the moving sidewalk previously identified as the world’s longest. It is morning when you step on the moving sidewalk. Your connecting flight departed 12 hours ago. Mid-afternoon you are shot from the moving sidewalk like a pea from a pea-shooter. You switch your heavy bag full of chocolate-covered passion fruits from your numb right hand to your left hand. The hallway in front of you stretches ahead an indeterminable distance, at the end of which is a sign indicating Passport Control. That evening you turn right. There are 34 Passport Booths. Twenty-four of them are wrapped in bright yellow crime-scene tape. Eleven are staffed by uniformed Passport agents. Four lines are for Visitors. Four lines are for US Citizens. Three lines are for Resident Aliens. You get in a line for citizens. No one else in line is speaking English. Nor are they speaking Spanish. You will have ample time to wonder what language they are speaking, but you will arrive at no conclusions.
A week later, after three families in front of you in line have been fingerprinted, x-rayed and subject to cavity searches, you step up to Raoul at Passport Control and present your documents. He wants to know if you are married to CSB. This is the only question he asks.
In customs, you declare Nothing.




*Have you noticed that Kafka is always invoked whenever we want to allude to some bureaucratic nightmare or labyrinthine and hellish space? Of course you have.

How not to be paranoid

I have discovered the perfect book to read, and not to read, in the middle of the night. Customer Service by Benoît Duteutrte, translated from the French. (Have I mentioned my craven Francophilia?)
CSB was awake with a nasty charley horse, and then I was as well. He wandered the house trying to walk off the charley horse, when it became clear that I was not going back to sleep any time soon I picked up this novella I bought a while back (largely on the basis of its cover and because I like the idea of novellas.) There is no hint (either on the cover or in the title) that it will compound and enhance your insomnia with paranoid dread.
At the beginning the narrator loses his new cell phone in a taxi, and when he goes to get the service cancelled and buy a new phone, he learns that he must pay the remaining 11 months of the service contract, in addition to the contract for his new phone. Things get worse. His Internet server demands a password and then PASSWORD INCORRECT flashes on the screen. His credit card is rejected while he is traveling. And he spends hours and hours on the phone, pressing numbers.But it doesn’t matter because all number sequences arrive at the same place: with a final recorded voice telling him that whatever is troubling him is the way it is meant to be, that it is all his fault, and there is nothing to be done. Unless of course he can reach Customer Service. Customer Service is of course a myth, a Minotaur at the end of the labyrinth that can only devour you if you are foolish enough to find your way there.
I kept reading.
When I was finished with the novella (in the pink early light) I began to obsess about my ongoing struggle with Chase bank to remove the $9.95 fee that gets deducted from my checking account monthly. This struggle began over a year ago when ‘Customer Service” at the bank told me that the fee was not their doing but was put there by Quicken. I cancelled my Quicken Bill Paying service over a year ago and yet the deduction continues, unabated and unrepentant. When I call Quicken they tell that I did indeed indeed cancel my service over a year ago but this fee is probably put there by Quicken dot com, which is a different entity from Quicken. (huh?) It is, however, impossible to reach Quicken.com either by telephone or email.

Where is Kafka when we need him?
How he would have loved the eternal forking of the automated telephone answering service:
Press 1 to continue in English; Press 2 for American Sign Language; Press 3 for any other language.
Press 1 if you are a person; press 2 if you are a business; press 3 if you are a monkey who has learned to press buttons.
Press 1 if this is a technical problem; press 2 for billing questions; press 3 if you don’t know what your problem is.
Press 1 if you are sedated; press 2 if you have drunk any alcohol in the past hour; press 3 if you have any lethal weapons in the room.
Thank you for calling our Customer Service. For additional help go to URFUCT.com and choose the Help Tab on the Menu Bar. Have a nice day.

Oh, and Happy Gnu Year.

Reading Suggestions Solicited

About a year ago we spent a lovely week with my parents at a coffee farm in Costa Rica (Dad, you have forgotten but you were there and you had a good time).
I take vacation reading very seriously. First of all, I simply need to be sure I have enough to read because the idea of being in a beautiful spot with great food, excellent walks and good company – but not enough reading material – strikes me as a sure path to misery; and second, I like to have appropriate reading material. In New Mexico I want to read Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoirs, in Prague I will read Kafka and Hrabal, in Ethiopia I will read Kapuscinski’s The Emperor and Waugh’s Black Mischief (very amusing), and in Costa Rica I will read the latest Bolaño, some Rubén Darío (Nicaragua is next to Costa Rica, closer than Russia is to Alaska) and the memoirs of Wilson Poponoe, the agronomist who scoured the jungles of Central America looking for the perfect avocado (a valiant effort if there ever was one).

I could go on.
CSB (who with whom it has been suggested I have Nothing in Common) has a rather different attitude about vacation reading. He thinks time in foreign parts is a perfectly good time to read all the back issues of Bee Culture and American Bee Journal and The Ins and Outs of Comb Honey.
We don’t travel light.
(Aldous Huxley, so I was once told, had traveling trunk specially made to carry all 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and he took it with him everywhere he went. There were very strong porters in those days and the airlines were less strict about carry-on, so I hear.)
Last year in Costa Rica, thanks to a brilliant Christmas gift by Peter and Fritz (well known re-gifters of books) CSB took along a book that had nothing whatever to do with honeybees. It was Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. He read it on the patio overlooking Volcan Turrialba and laughed aloud. He read it on Playa Junquillal and chortled enticingly.
“What is so funny?” I would demand.
CSB insisted that I would not find the story of an American boyhood in Omaha as funny as he did because I am [choose one: effete, not a normal American, insufficiently steeped in 1960's TV arcana, a Proustian manqué, a bleeding heart-white-wine drinking liberal, all of the above].
“Just read me something and see if I laugh,” I begged.
Grudgingly, he complied.
Of course I thought it was funny. When Bill Bryson is funny he is hilarious and when Stanley Katz enters the tale, all caution flies.
I am not THAT effete.

Which brings me to the request. (Has anyone read this far?) We are returning soon to the coffee farm, with my parents, and I seek another amusing book for CSB. Please send suggestions.