We Are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek

Author:James Meek [Meek, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9781847671912
Publisher: Canongate Us
Published: 2008-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

8

The immigration officer found the old Afghan visa in Kellas’s passport and asked why he’d been there. Kellas said he’d been covering the war for his newspaper.

‘What war?’ asked the immigration officer.

‘Your war,’ said Kellas.

‘My war?’

‘Not you personally. America’s war. After, you know. The…’ He held his left hand up vertically, side-on to the immigration officer, and softly drove his horizontal right hand into it.

The immigration officer’s eyes narrowed. He closed the passport. Instead of handing it back, he stood up and flapped it rapidly to and fro, like a wet print, looking around the booths and queues in the hall, as if he would see something there to help him. He shook his head, laid the passport down, stamped it and gave it to Kellas. He held up his left hand vertically, side-on to Kellas, and softly drove his horizontal right hand into it.

‘I wouldn’t do that again while you’re here,’ he said. ‘Enjoy your visit.’

Kellas walked into the United States. He withdrew three hundred dollars from an ATM, bought a copy of the New York Times and went outside to the taxi rank. The cold air frisked him and he closed the jacket and turned the collar up and hugged the bulk of the Times to his chest. He needed winter clothes. Good that he’d arrived rich and not like a poor immigrant. Good that the people in Europe were paying him the best part of two years’ salary for his work imagining a future war between this side of the Atlantic and theirs. He got into a cab and asked for 19th Street and Park Avenue South.

It was overheated in the car, and gloomy in the low, deep, black seats, the partition up against his face. The sky was a fathomless grey. They were fast on the expressways through Queens and hit traffic on the approach to the bridge. The grimy painted wooden slats on the walls of the small houses backing onto the road, the screen doors, the scruffy verges, the brake light in front brightening scarlet under a silver sign that read ‘Cadillac’, triggered in Kellas unmixable sensations of the alien and the familiar. He was undergoing the only experience an American born in the USA could never have. Their movies and TV and songs were a fake version of the real thing to them, and they knew this. They grew up with both. For foreigners arriving here, America was a marvel harder to believe, infinitely more wondrous: a real version of a notorious fake. It was a visitation of the legend played across their eyes in two electric, high-contrast dimensions, of the myth lining their ears note by note, since before they could remember. What a sound! What a sight! Like a long-lens paparazzi shot of Jesus on the beach, paler, flabbier, shorter, with less holy eyes than the icons had it, staggeringly real. Here it was, known, recognisable, and so much lumpier, grainier and messier than the exported songs and stories, and impossible

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