Heartland

Mark Teppo Heartland

THE FIRST WORK

'Yet, poor old heart, he helped the heavens to rain.

If wolves had at thy gate howl'd that stern time,

Thou shouldst have said 'Good porter, turn the key,'

All cruels else subscribed: but I shall see

The winged vengeance overtake such children.'

— William Shakespeare, King Lear

I

Is the nature of your trip business or pleasure?'

'Business,' I said. I showed the customs agent one of my generic business cards. 'Meetings, actually.'

He gave the card a cursory glance, as there wasn't much on it. Minimalist design aesthetic, that leave-much- to-the-imagination attitude that made it easier when I had to use a different passport. 'Antiques,' he said. The corners of his mouth moved up. 'In Los Angeles.'

'Hollywood,' I explained. 'Scouting for movie props, and for some private clients. That's why I'm here, actually. I figure if I can open an office in Paris, then-' A well-timed shrug. '-you know, they're all about facades out there.'

As compared to here-at Charles de Gaulle Airport-not far from Paris, that glittering cultural center of the universe. But the rule still applied: tell someone what they want to hear, and without meaning to, they let you become invisible.

The agent's stoic expression eased, his lips edging toward a real smile, and he thumbed through several pages of my passport. 'Yes,' he said, nodding. 'They are fascinated with how things look.'

Like a well-used passport. He had been doing this job for some time as he had unconsciously started looking to match port of entry stamps with whatever his computer screen was telling him. But the old method of stamping passports was another victim of computerization. A lot of countries didn't even bother stamping the pages anymore, but that didn't wipe away the old rituals, the old way of thinking. Banishing the cultural and muscle memory took longer.

Piotr's contact had liked my suggestion of modeling the travel history on my own. Easier to keep the lies straight that way. The really clever bit had been to reuse a majority of the pages of my old passport so as to include those few places that still did the stamps. Authenticity is a matter of matching enough details to fool the experts, and more often than not, they presuppose what they should see anyway.

'Your French. . ' he said as he turned back to the front, '. . it is very good.' An inflection in his voice, just a hint there at the end of the word, suggesting a question.

'Thank you.' I swallowed, pushing down the knot forming in my throat. In the past, my French had been serviceable; now, it was much better, but then I wasn't relying on my experiences alone. The Chorus twisted in my chest, a memory of old snakes, and from their coils, I heard the rising echo of their voice-the susurrating echo of many pretending to be one. I had always absorbed language quickly from the Chorus, but this time the connection was different, and my fluency was nearly perfect.

The customs agent nodded, his attention on my passport picture, and I realized he was waiting for me to elaborate. We had used the picture from my old passport as well, instead of playing games with image manipulation. My hair was shorter now, and lighter. Looking at the picture, I could see how haunted I had been: the stain of the Qliphoth in the flesh below my eyes, the distant stare, the slack skin of my face, the shadows at the base of my throat. I looked like a man worn out before his time, and the only distinguishing feature-the one detail that made the rest irrelevant-was the white band of hair. A narrow braid of fine hair ran around my throat. A gift from Reija, my Finnish witch. A reminder of what I had both lost and gained with the Chorus.

Piotr had vouched for the forger. A Five of Disks man. Reliable. Very competent. There was nothing to worry about. This is one man's curiosity. Nothing more. Keep the lie simple. Make it true.

'My mother's uncle lived along the Aude,' I explained. The lie came easily-much like my new fluency with the language-as if it was true. As if I believed it. 'We used to visit every year when I was younger.' The Chorus coalesced into a stream of images: the farm house, its brick chimney leaning toward the east; the wooden railing of the horse pasture fence; the trees along the slow water. It wasn't my past, but the memory was mine now, part of the mental travelogue of my life.

There, in my head, the image of a dark-haired girl, chasing white geese across the pale field. Yellow flowers, early to bloom. Spring at the farm.

'But not recently,' the customs agent said. His gaze flickered toward his computer screen.

'No,' I said carefully. 'I've been. . traveling elsewhere.'

He gave no indication he had heard my emphasis, and for a moment, I felt like a fool for trying such a trick. They weren't watching. Not this way.

A few months ago, when I had been interrogated in Seattle by the local Watcher, Lt. Pender of the Metropolitan Division of the SPD, he had pulled an extensive list of countries I had visited from TSA. It hadn't even occurred to me until a few days later that if Pender could pull that data so quickly, who was to say that other members of La Societe Lumineuse weren't equally able to query this data? I had been careful to stay hidden on a magickal level, but I had been trusting to security through obscurity-stay off the watch lists, give the security agencies no reason to notice me, and trust that the avalanche of data could never be properly mined to track me.

Even with the reassurance in my head from the Chorus that they weren't Watching this way, even with the added obscuration of the fake passport, I couldn't help that momentary spasm of panic that I was being a fool for coming back to Paris. That I was doing exactly what someone wanted me to do.

You are, a spirit in the Chorus whispered, and the rest of them turned the hiss of these two words into echoing laughter.

'Just the one bag?' the agent asked, oblivious to the tension knotting up my spine.

I nodded.

The agent's gaze flickered toward the line of waiting passengers behind me. 'Most don't travel lightly,' he said. 'Lots of baggage.'

I forced my heart to slow down. I exhaled slowly through my nose, pulling a Kundalini warmth up from my belly, up through the tension in my spine, up to my throat and face where it could lift the corners of my mouth. 'I travel a lot,' I said, the words falling through the warmth in my throat. 'I learned the lesson some time ago: travel light; you never need as much baggage as you think you do.' Each word came easier, drawing the tension out of my body. Growing lighter with each letter, shedding the weight of old paranoia. It was still so easy to be bound by that old way of thinking, that bleak fury that had driven me for so long, that restless need for revenge. In the dim chambers of my heart, it was easy to welcome back that old animal instinct. 'Besides, the airlines charge now for extra weight. I tell you, they're getting cheaper all the time. Soon they'll be weighing us when we board. . '

The customs agent nodded, no longer listening to me, as he tapped a few keys. 'Welcome to Paris, M. Dupont,' he said as he slid my passport across the counter. 'Have a nice visit.'