Witness at the Customs Shed

I was sixty-one years old, sitting on a folding chair in a colonial jail, and I was thinking about the time I almost took my shirt off for a stranger at an airport, which is a sentence I never expected to compose in my head at this stage of my life but there you go.

The flight to Yangon had been cancelled at seven in the evening because a sewer line under the Nyaungbinzeik market had collapsed and flooded the only road to the terminal, and so the airline had bundled all of us stranded passengers onto a bus and driven us to the only public building in Mawlamyine that still had lights on, which turned out to be the Customs Shed Museum, and specifically the old British cell block out back, a long dim corridor of restored iron-bar doors and empty cells that had been somebody's worst night in 1890 and was now somebody's mildly interesting afternoon in the present.

Rafael had gone off with Ben Tran to look at the vehicle barriers, because that is the kind of man Rafael is, sixty-three years old and retired from logistics and constitutionally unable to see a piece of equipment he knows about without offering an opinion on it, and I had stayed behind on my folding chair with a bottle of water and thirty years of memory.

Because I had been stuck in Mawlamyine before.

I was thirty-one then, a junior carpenter on a bridge project, one of maybe four women on the whole crew, and my flight home had been delayed, not by a sewer but by weather, and I had spent six hours in the old airport customs hall watching a young officer check passports. He was twenty-eight, maybe, tall and serious, with a way of looking up at each person like they were the most interesting document he had read all day, and when my turn came he looked at me like that and I felt it go through me like a current, and I flirted with him, I did, in the stupid brave way you flirt with a man in uniform when you are thirty-one and far from home and feeling like the world owes you one adventure.

What I never did, what I thought about for three decades on and off like a tongue finding a missing tooth, was the other thing I almost did. There was a moment when the hall had mostly emptied and he was restamping papers and I stood there with my passport in my hand and I genuinely considered, I mean I got as far as my hand on the hem of my shirt, showing him something. Anything. Just to see his face change. Just to be, for one minute, the kind of woman who does that. And then I chickened out, put my shirt hem down, said thank you very much, and flew home, and married a man who turned out to be no fun at all, and the whole thing curdled into one of those what-ifs you keep in a drawer.

"Sonja." Rafael came back down the corridor holding something up like a trophy, and his voice echoed off the iron bars in a way that made him laugh. "Look at this. Monofilament, a whole knot of it, with seaweed still in it. It was snagged on the gate hardware at the old dock entrance. Someone was fishing here, a long time ago, through the fence. Terrible practice, terrible line quality, but a fascinating knot."

He held it out and I took it, this tangle of old fishing line with a dried ribbon of weed caught in the middle, and something about holding it while sitting in a jail made me want to talk.

"You know I almost got arrested-adjacent in this town once," I said, and he sat down beside me on the folding chair, which creaked, and gave me the look that means go on, I have retired and I have time.

"Not arrested. Nothing happened, that's the whole point, that's the tragedy of it." I turned the knot over in my hands. "Thirty years ago, the bridge project, I was stuck here overnight, flight delayed, and there was this customs officer at the airport. Young. Gorgeous. Serious face. And I flirted with him for hours, Rafael, and at the very end, when the hall was empty, I almost showed him my chest. Just, you know. Opened my shirt. Right there at the counter."

Rafael raised his eyebrows and glanced, exaggeratedly, down the corridor in both directions, which made me smack his arm. "And?"

"And nothing! I lost my nerve. I have thought about that man maybe twice a year for thirty years. Not him specifically even, more the version of me who would have done it. I want to meet her. I want to be her for like ten minutes."

"You are her," Rafael said, easily, the way he says things, "you just haven't done the shirt yet," and I looked at him and he looked at me and we had been together four years now, met at a trade expo in Bangkok a year after he retired, when he'd watched me explain jointing techniques to a crowd of strangers with more showmanship than the subject strictly required, and he knows exactly what I am. He married the woman who talks about flashing customs officers. He has never once seemed startled by it.

Before I could answer, footsteps came down the corridor, slow and even, and a voice called out in English with that careful, practiced rhythm, "Apologies, ladies and gentlemen, if I could ask everyone to remain seated, the buses will return for the morning flight at five, water is available at the end of the corridor, please do not enter the cells themselves, some of the floors are uneven."

I froze.

I knew that voice. Not the words, the voice. Thirty years is a long time and voices change, deepen, pick up sand, but there was something in the cadence, that particular care with each sentence, that I would have known anywhere, because I had spent six hours of my thirty-first year listening to it read out names.

The man walking toward us down the dim corridor was heavier than the officer I remembered, gray through the temples, in a museum security uniform instead of customs whites, but the way he held his flashlight low and pointed at the floor out of politeness, that was the same, that was exactly the same.

"Ben Tran," I whispered, and Rafael said, "Who?" and I said, "That's him. That's the customs officer. He works here. He's the night guard here," and my heart was doing something I refused to narrate because I am sixty-one years old and dignified, allegedly.

He reached the end of our row of chairs and lifted the flashlight politely and said, "Anything you need, madam, we have blankets coming from the office," and I said, "No, thank you, we're fine," in a voice that came out an octave higher than I meant it to, and he moved on down the corridor checking the other passengers, and I sat there gripping a knot of fishing line with seaweed in it like it was a rosary.

"Sonja." Rafael's hand came over mine. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I've seen a what-if," I said. "He's real. He's here. He's fifty-eight years old and he checks on stranded travelers at midnight."

Rafael was quiet for a moment, and then he said, very carefully, "What are you thinking?"

And I will be honest with whoever reads this, because that is the deal with these stories, what I was thinking was that thirty years ago a woman put her hand on her shirt hem and put it back down, and that woman had been waiting in me ever since, and tonight the universe had gone to the trouble of cancelling a flight, flooding a market, and steering us both, the carpenter and the customs officer, into a jail with empty cells and iron doors, and if that wasn't a stage being set then I didn't know what was.

"I'm thinking," I said, "that this time I'm not going to put my hand down."

I said it plainly, sitting there on the folding chair with the fishing line still wound around my fingers, because Rafael and I settled things plainly before anything else, that is how we have always worked, and this was no different. "Here is what I want," I told him, quiet, leaning close under the dim lamp at the end of the corridor. "I want to do it this time. In one of those open cells. Facing the corridor. And I want Ben Tran to see me. Not to talk to him, not to touch him, nothing like that. Just to be seen by him. Witnessed. Like a scene with an audience of one." Rafael set his thermos down on the concrete floor and looked at me, and I watched him work through it, the way he works through tire reports, methodically, one wheel at a time. "You want the guard," he said slowly, "to watch us.

While we," and he let the sentence trail off the way he does when he is buying time. "Yes. That is the whole of it. He never speaks, we never speak to him, he is just there on his rounds, and I finally finish what I started at that counter thirty years ago." He rubbed his jaw and glanced down the corridor, where Ben's flashlight was still moving at the far end, patient as a lighthouse. "There are forty other passengers asleep in this building, Sonja."

"They are all the way down the hall and it is dark and they are exhausted. Nobody is looking at a middle-aged couple. Only him, because his job is to walk past and look."

"And if he tells us to stop? If he says it is museum property, if he gets upset?"

"Then we stop, instantly, and I apologize, and that is the end. I am not going to do anything to a man who has not agreed to see it, you know me better than that. But he will be doing his rounds regardless. I am only going to be standing where his rounds pass." Rafael was quiet for a long moment, and I could see him turning it over, and I want to be truthful about what happened next because it surprised me too. He shifted on the folding chair and tugged at the waistband of his trousers and said, in a low voice with a laugh buried in it, "Well. That is embarrassing."

"What?"

"The idea. It makes me harder than I expected. Considerably harder. I was prepared to be the sensible one tonight and apparently I am not." I laughed, maybe too loudly, and clapped a hand over my own mouth. "You are not angry?"

"Angry. Sonja, I married a woman who explains wood joints like a ring announcer. Did you think watching you perform for an audience was going to trouble me?" He paused and grew more serious. "One condition. The moment he signals anything but disinterest, anything at all beyond a professional glance, you stop. And he never joins us. You said witness and I am holding you to witness."

"Witness only. Agreed." We shook hands on it, and it was absurd and lovely, and we reminded each other that we had been tested together when we met and had been exclusive for four years, so there was no question of protection, and then Rafael went to speak to Ben at the end of the corridor, man to man, guard to visitor, and I do not know exactly what he said, I only heard the low murmur and then Ben's careful voice replying, and then Rafael came back with a strange, tight expression and said, "I asked him plainly. I told him what we want, and that he is free to say no and that nothing is held against him either way. He said the cells are officially closed. Then he said he understood, that he would stand witness from the far end of the corridor only if we both still want it, that he will look away the moment either of us asks, and that he will log nothing. He said this is his own choice and has nothing to do with his job."

"And you believe him?"

"He said it twice, the second time without my asking. He added that the center cell has the best floor."

"That is a yes!"

"That is a yes the way customs officers say yes, which is to say entirely in nouns, and a few words." So we waited, and it was strange, the waiting, sitting among the snoring stranded passengers with my heart pounding as a drum line