Korê in New York

What happens when a kid refuses to leave the past behind? What happens when the past won't go away? Read on and don't worry about the emotional damage.

1. Arrival in Darkness

   Dad picked me up at school on Friday.  This was the same Friday that somewhere else a bit earlier in the day, my mother had retrieved Kyril from the Fronicks. They were probably on the Thruway by now heading to the distant reaches of Herkimer County. Kyril was in trouble. Kyril deserved to be in trouble, but being in trouble still expletive deleted.

   My duffle was in the back of the truck. No one had done boudega duty so we found a store which was not the calliope and I bought both Dad and me cold drinks. We sipped them as Dad found his way into a traffic jam for the stop and go ride across the city and then down into New Jersey to Newark Liberty Airport.

   I thought about the light panel practice I was missing. We had Drama Club and Lighting Crew today. I did not want to think about Kyril, and Dad did not speak about  him. Instead we listened to WNYC which played the BBC’s the World. All the news sounded like it came from far away or maybe some other planet.

   “OK, I’m tired so forgive me if I sound distracted,” Dad began. Whenever an adult asks you to forgive them, it is a rhetorical trick. It is not real Noblesse Oblige. It just means they know they are doing a suckie job or are having fales modesty about doing a good job. Dad only did a mediocre job which given all the stress he was under was about all I could expect.

   “Kore you need to remember you will only be gone seven days. Rialitee is a regular, nonsecret, paid, commercial, all inclusive resort. It is on an artificial island that I helped create. It has a desalinization plant for all its water.

   “As for the rest, there are limits to how much social experimentation they can do given that it’s a publicly accessible resort. You’re also only going to be there for seven days. That puts another limit on what they can do.

   “Still you have to be careful. No doubt they want to watch you. You’re a Fouding Member of a Young Achiever’s Chapter. Let’s just say that makes you interesting. There is a good chance that every electronic communication leaving Rialitee is packet sniffed.”

   “Are you saying my cell phone is tapped?” I asked.

   “Yes, and every piece of email and everything you do on a computer.”

   “Shit,” I answered.

   “Well, now you know. Communicate out only if you have an emergency like if they are starving you.

   “Remember. you are also our eyes and ears.”

   “I’m just a kid.”

   “You’re nearly fifteen. That is not really that young, and we had Margolin for the same resaon at Christmas.”

   I said nothing. True I was not a child soldier like those poor boys in Uganda or Sierra Leone who carry machine guns and who rape their sisters, but I was a kid doing an adult’s work. I was being sent to where the Fast Crowd could do a job on me. In fact, they were going to do a job on me.

   When we reached Newark Liberty Airport, Dad asked if I had my ticket. I thought about pretending to lose it. I thought about really losing it by tearing it up and flushing it down the toilet. I thought about telling him I did not want to go to the Turks and Caicos where there was an all inclusive resort on an artificial island and… I thought about just plain running.

   I didn’t run. I hugged my Dad. I went through security and then I thought about hiding in the bathroom. I didn’t hide. I got on the Air Tran flight to Miami. “Go there’s nothing stopping you!” I thought. Oddly enough with all my options to escape not taken, I was relieved and I fell asleep as soon as I could no longer see the lights of the New York Metro area below me.

   I awoke around 7:30pm EST as the plane circled over Miami International Airport. From here it would be general aviation. I’d be a real prisoner. On the ground someone from the Sidlow tribe was waiting for me. Should I: hide in the bathroom? just run out of the airport? I pictured myself calling Dad or maybe Mom who would be far more understanding intially before becoming totally pissed off for letting myself go as far as Miami and telling them I’d changed my mind. I pictured just staying put like a deer in the headlights by the ticket counter until some concerned soul asked what was wrong with me or if I was “all right.” I decided this last possibliity sucked most of all.

   I deplaned among the last passengers because I was in no rush. I had had nothing solid to eat since before noon. You know when we have lunch at Brooklyn Tech. I shouldered my duffle and checked an airport map. I had a pretty good idea of a plan that would be fun and useful and best of all would not suck.

   I looked at the restaurants and sure enough there was one serving Cuban food. It was in the main area one concourse over. I came out of security and walked through the halls. My Sidlow minion did not have a set place to meet me. Well he or she could join me for supper. I got in the line of the Cuban buffet and ordered a pork sandwich with special sauce on a roll and a dessert order of maduros and a Cuban soda called an Iron Beer which tastes a lot like Dr. Pepper. Cubans have good taste in the cuisine.

   I was about a third of the way through my sandwich when a herd of Sidlows thundered inside. There was Davida, Margolin, a girl I did not know yet, and their minder, a six foot something amazon with long, straight, honey colored hair. “She’s in there,” the Amazon said.

   “She’s stuffing her face,” remarked Davida.

   “Her whole family does that,” answered Margolin.

   “God think of the carbs in that sandwich,” whinged the unknown friend.

   “Care to join me?” I asked. “I thought I’d have some supper since we won’t arrive until late. The food here is very good.”

   Davida made a fake barfing sound. Margolin stared at her feet. The Amazon bought a bottled water and Davida did the same. Margolin got a salad with cold cuts with which she toyed. We made an uncomfortable grouping. We had nothing about which to talk.

   I asked when our plane left and the Amazon guard said about 9:30pm. That gave me time to finish and walk off the food at least out into the balmy parking lot where the Amazon had a truck at the ready to take the three of us to the general aviation part of the airport.

   We rumbled between hangars and repair shops and terminals in silence. I thought of how my friend from Brooklyn Tech, Larisa, would enjoy this trip. That thought made me feel better. The general aviation and private jet lounge was decorated in tropical plants and had a huge glass window and some sort of a bar. Kayla and Marcus Sidlow waited for us.

   “What took you so long?” was Kayla’s greeting.

   “I didn’t want to disturb Kore’s dinner,” the Amazon replied sullenly.

   “Dinner?” asked Kayla.

   “There are restaurants in the airport,” Marcus explained.

   “What kind of restaurant did you eat at?” Marcus asked.

   I told him about the Cuban Buffet. Kayla shook her head. Marcus smiled. “We could have gotten you something to eat,” answered Kayla. “They have food here.” I didn’t say anything. I wondered if there was a way to make myself absent by reading a book.

   “So are you excited about spending a week in the islands?” Marcus changed the conversation.

   If an artificially created island could be called the Caribbean and I knew I was getting a real vacation, I’d be excited. Instead, I just nodded and watched out the window. Prop planes and the occasional private jet taxied up and down the runway.

   “I thought only retards liked planes,” sniggered the girl whose name I did not know.

   I felt my face start to burn. “Leave Kore alone,” Margolin advised. “She’s really very smart. She’s like those aspargers’ kids, good at some things and not interested in others.”

   “Oh I see,” strange girl liked the explanation.

   I kept my eyes on the runway. I told myself that planes were the most interesting things in the world.

   The private jet to Rialittee (It’s actual arrival destination was the island of Providenciales which I’d looked up on a map.) was half full with tired looking rich folks, pale with a long winter and tired from a long day on the East Coast. I managed to snag a window seat. I refused even a cold drink. I read as the plane took off. I read until my eyes grew too heavy and then I stared at the page. “You’re not going to be able to keep this up forever,” I told myself as I felt the plane descend from the clouds.

   Airport lights look the same wherever you go. I remembered the small bus waiting for us on the tarmac. Inside the bus I began to feel a profound disorientation. I was in another country. I was not going through customs. I felt for my passport. I reminded myself that I could not walk into a bodega to buy anything because here the currency was not dollars. Do they take dollars everywhere? Why should they? It would make my life very complicated if I owned a bodega in the Turks and Caicos.

   The bus took us from the airport through a neighborhood of high rises and what looked like hotels to an area of warehouses and piers and then we walked again. Two servants carried a cart of luggage but I had only one duffle. I can make a quick getaway, two thousand miles back to New York. Yeah, some get away.

   There was no where to read a book and nothing to watch except the waves or if I turned around the city lights as I stood on the pier. I thought of fishing piers on the Jersey Shore. We had gone there when I was seven, when Mom and Dad were still married. I tried to push away the memory. Davida, Margolin, and the strange girl tried to put a conversation together about whether teenagers were allowed into all the clubs at Rialitee. I did not give a good four letter word even if that word indicated a poverty of imagination.

   Margolin and stranger girl were still arguing when the ferry arrived to take about a dozen new arrivals to Rialittee. Rialittee was a ring shaped atoll with a small notch to let water craft into and out of the inner lagoon and a dune surrounding the ring like icing on a doughnut. The ferry came in through the notch. In the darkness, I could make out half a dozen high rise structures and villas piled up like layers on a wedding cake and large buildings of indeterminate function. Dad did not know what these are. He had only done the engineering for the land mass itself and the desalinization plant that kept it going.

   I don’t have to tell you that my family never took vacations at places like this. Our tours both before and after the divorce were always cultural. All the adults liked to see how people lived in real places and not spend time being pampered in made up ones. Well, my parents were back in New York. I was on my own. For a week I would twist in the wind. I knew I would suck as a spy. I had to suck. I had no training and I was not yet fifteen. That was excuse enough, I thought as a hotel worker whose dark black face shone with sweat even though the night was  not that warm led us up a trail paved with white pebbles and ground up shells that led along the pile up of villas.

   The Sidlows had taken a three bedroom villa. Davida and Margolin roomed together. I got to room with the stranger who went by the name of Hannah. She had three suitcases and only unpacked half of them. The stranger asked for a smoothy from room service and Margolin and Davida decided they wanted one too. I wondered if I could get away with reading my book again. I lay my duffle on the end of my fake tropical, double size bed and began putting away my clothes. I’d be here a week. Seven days and it would be over. I tried to smell the odor of disgusting sweaty bodies and mould that prisons have, but instead, I smelled salt air, just like Coney Island. I emerged into the living room where the other three girls awaited their dinner.

   I said I wanted to take a short walk. I just kept going in case the Sidlows felt like saying “no.” They said nothing. I had a room key. I had shitloads of Noblesse Oblige. I walked down the white trail, down two levels and there was a beach covered with tracks of some big earth moving machine. At the edge of the beach under a stand of palmettos someone, probably  hotel staff, had piled up cabanas and lounge chairs and cushions. In the late night, they looked just like shadows of chairs and cushions. It looked like the hotel was closed for the season. I stepped over the slightly moist machine tracks and walked toward the lagoon. The water was black and shiney.

   There was no moon to turn it blue or turquoise, but it really was the sea and the air really was warm enough to make me stiflingly hot inside my sweater, long johns, t-shirt, and jeans. Tomorrow I’d wear shorts, t-shirt, and bra. It would be summer for a whole week. This would be like Florida or better than Florida, the real tropics. Don’t forget your sunscreen and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is the best book in th whole, stinking world!

Archive