Ghosts Don't Recognize Borders

Because of the soured milk, I didn’t notice the barbed wire they had put up in the night. I’d only bought the milk two days ago. Kids probably left it out while they were here. Bet they never leave it out at their mothers. It was only after I’d buttered my toast and gone to my window to enjoy the sunrise peeking through fresh green leaves recently freed from wooden buds, I noticed the red-armed gate across my sidewalk. Two soldiers, rifles threatening my crabgrass, stood outside the guardhouse planted on my lawn. Tightening my flannel robe I went back to the kitchen and poured some orange juice. I prefer milk with my toast, but I made do.

I stood on my front porch for however long it took to get over my rather understandable fear of strange men with guns standing in the yard. Outside the chain link fence, all eight feet of it, my neighbors, with certainty of purpose, walked and drove past my current situation. As if ignoring my current plight was their new job. I went back inside and brewed a cup of coffee. I would have preferred it with a splash of milk. But, one must make do. No matter the situation. Cup in hand, I walked to the guards, as unthreatening as a little boy in a pinafore.

“Excuse me, gentlemen, may I ask what you’re doing here?”

I received no answer and stepped closer as if that was the issue with their hearing. Their faces felt more like a collection of features. Standard issue strong chin pulling at their helmet strap, neatly shaved skin with a beard ready and waiting to break regulation, flaring nostrils to sniff out danger.

“Please, gentleman, why are you here?”

My only answer was a look that plainly said I was nothing and should not be here in this place, at this time. That I should no more be bothering them than a fly should bother the pope in his little car. As this was my home, it seemed a rather strange thing for his look to say.

“I will need to be leaving for work soon and, well, I also see that your fence, which looks very well made, is crossing over my driveway. I’m not quite sure how I’m meant to leave.”

“Do you have your passport?”

“Hmmm, excuse me?”

“You can’t enter the Neighborhood without a passport.”

“But, this is my neighborhood. I’ve lived here for years, and….”

“Per the current laws as laid out by the Homeowner’s Accord, this land you occupy is no longer an incorporated part of the Neighborhood, and you cannot enter without a passport.”

“But how do I get a passport?”

“By petitioning the governing council, which meets every other Thursday at the Courthouse. In person, with a notarized copy of your birth certificate, and proof of current employment with a valid work visa.”

“But, that would mean I need a passport to get my passport and this work visa. I think that would pose a problem, don’t you?”

I took his return to silence as agreement. Sipping my coffee, quickly cooling under the gaze of my captors, I looked out over this new land that had sprung up overnight. I found I recognized almost none of the neighbors who would not look at me. Many were fresh transplants, so that was unsurprising. But even the houses looked like they had recently moved in and failed to introduce themselves. Once, I could have entered any house on the block to borrow some fresh milk and been welcomed for a chat at the kitchen table. Those neighbors had washed out on a wave I failed to catch. Now, each door looked closed to me, leaving me outside to drown.

Back in the house, I called in to work and relayed my current issue. My boss, only recently put in charge and in desperate need to show he was in control, chastised my lack of a passport and detailed how my absence would impact the group’s productivity and standing. I reminded him I had two weeks of vacation days and that he could bite me. My reserves of civility had been dangerously used up. What little I had left must be kept for the armed men out front, not sniveling middle managers.

Pouring a splash of whiskey in my coffee (it was my day off, after all), I began making calls. Or tried to. Curiously, few would answer me. I could only reach people who could not help or weren’t in the right department but were very sorry about my plight, and even more sorry that I had not secured the necessary passport. They told me how they hoped it all could be resolved but let me know the soldiers were just doing their jobs and I shouldn’t blame them for my situation. When I caught a receptionist for the right people, inevitably I was put on hold and dropped into an abyss of voicemails. Multiple calls to my ex went unanswered, but I knew she would call back once the children had done something she could blame on me.

All this time, I kept an eye on my stoic guardians in their sweat-stained uniforms, thick boots browner than the grass dying in the scorching sun. Outside the fence, the sun slowly set behind the houses of this new and foreign land. A Jeep pulled up, and another uniformed man jumped out. My guards smartly saluted as he marched up the sidewalk. With a perfunctory knock, he announced his presence and his right to walk straight into my home. The home my children had cried and laughed in most of their lives, and now only on weekends. The home I had painted the wrong shade, Cadet Blue 1 vs 2. The home I now occupied instead of living in. This new soldier had gotten his face from the same box as the others, though he’d gotten to pick out a few more pins and baubles to stick on the chest. Hand outstretched, I stood up to meet him, and he pulled his gun. In the dark, greased barrel, I found another abyss. Who knew there were so many?

“Sit down! Away from the window!”

I asked, “Why should I?” while I did as I was told.

“It is my job to ensure the safety of my men.”

He dropped the blinds and wrenched the curtains closed. In a deft piece of magic, he zip-tied the drawstrings, all with the gun still pointed at my head.

“You are not to open these. You are not to spy on my soldiers.”

I spluttered, “Spy!? Look here, you all are on my lawn, blocking me from my neighborhood…”

“Per the Homeowner’s Accord, this Neighborhood has the right to protect itself from dangerous elements. While most of the land you continue to occupy is no longer a part of the Neighborhood, you are still subject to the agreed upon accords.”

“Who agreed? I certainly didn’t!”

“The Homeowner’s Council Representative for your district agreed that this was best.”

“I didn’t exactly vote him in. Hell, I don’t even know who you’re talking about!”

“Sir, you need to remain calm and do nothing else to make my soldiers fear for their safety in any way. We have been very professional to this point. For your safety and theirs, abide by the rules.”

“I don’t know what the rules are!” I yelled quietly, strangled by incredulity.

Message delivered, he marched out of the house as quickly as he’d come in, leaving the door open. I did not dare close it. In the morning, in a defiant bit of rule-following, I closed all the windows in the house so I would not have to see the men at their gate, and they could not see me. Just a shadow against the curtains waiting to become a ghost story. I did not go outside. I still did not close the door. Maybe if I had, time would have been kept at bay. But it swirled in with the red and yellow leaves piling up on the foyer tiles. Days passed in the next few hours. Maybe if I had gone out there, my world could have ended in person rather than imploded over the phone.

My manager informed me, a weaselly smile in his voice, that they were letting me go. It was my own fault for not having the work visa that had not existed until a day ago. A week ago? An hour ago? My refrigerator, empty of everything but condiments, forced me to order food for delivery. Food that my captors inspected while they interrogated the delivery drivers. Were they trying to sneak in contraband? Weapons, drugs, innocuous conversation about the weather? Promises of freedom for some price I could never meet? The bank called to let me know they had frozen my funds. Since I had stopped looking, my fence had grown taller, stretched into the cloud, blocking the digital transfer of made-up numbers. A few hours later, maybe two days before, the utility companies had called after they had cut off my power and water. There were no contracts to deliver services to my territory. And, finally, my ex-wife called back.

She had taken sole custody of the children. Men with guns prowled outside my home, so it was no longer safe. I had no job to pay child support. I could not provide them food or even warmth as the cold winds came in and snow gathered on the horizon. Most importantly, most violating, was that I was no longer in the country I had grown up in because they had moved the borders. I had never left my house, yet they had taken away my home.

Her voice faded with the dying phone. I let the useless thing drop on the rug. I looked around the dark room and knew that for all the things I had, I had nothing. A table that would never have food. Chairs that would never see company. Pictures of children I would not recognize the next time I saw them.

I cut the zip ties and flung my curtains open. I yanked the blinds so hard they fell to the ground. The guards saw me and held their metal pets tight to their bodies, protecting them from dangerous elements. In the open doorway, I looked at myself in the mirror. Unshaved, unshowered, unwanted. Cut off from the world by an invisible string they wanted to thread around my neck. I walked along the cold cement without shoes and flung my flannel robe to the dirt. The soldiers yelled at me in words wrapped with barbed wire that said, “Stop! You have no rights because we took them from you! Because you did not leave when you had the chance! Even after we took the chance from you. It is your fault that we have put you in this position!”

I answered his barbs with a fist that broke against his standard issue face. They responded with metal that cracked my jaw, my knee, and my nose. My blood polished their boots. They wrenched out my shoulder, zip-tying my hands behind my back. Carrying my broken body past the gate, I chuckled until the bile choked me. I’d found my passport.

As they drove me away, I could see the lights in the house come on. The fence was taken down, section by section, and the barbed wire rolled up. The gatehouse came apart like a community theater set. One of the soldiers removed his uniform, revealing a freshly pressed suit. He planted his rifle in the ground and unfurled a for-sale sign. A new family moved in and exorcised my ghost.

I saw all this as they took me away to prison. As if I hadn’t already been in one. For the crime of living in a place they wanted, I would waste the rest of my years in a land of refuse. Stuck in a land of paucity, until we died or the ground became more valuable than our barren lives. Then the fences would come down, and houses would spring up like gravestones built to celebrate the life of everyone but the dead they marked. No matter how beautiful, a cemetery is still a cemetery. And the ghosts you made will haunt you all the same.