Free The Illegal by Lawrence Hill

FIFTEEN-KILOMETRE TEST RACE IN Metallurgia, Anton Hamm announced that he was leaving for a business trip out of town but would be back in time to watch. He took Keita’s passport, visa and ID with him. All Keita had was his clothes, the snacks that he had been hoarding from the dining room, the money that he had been saving (twenty dollars a day from Hamm for spending money), plus the two-thousand-dollar signing bonus.
    Early the next morning, during breakfast, Keita was summoned to the office for a phone call from Hamm. He reassured Hamm that his run the day before had gone well, his legs felt fine and he was ready for the race.
    After Keita hung up, he returned to his room and stuffed his clothes, five apples, four pears, three peanut butter sandwiches, two energy bars and a litre of water into his large knapsack. He shovedhis small knapsack inside it, too. He put on his running gear and laced up his shoes. Keita hid his cash in a zippered pocket inside his knapsack, but he kept a fifty-dollar bill in each of his pants pockets. Then he slipped out the door and jogged, with the knapsack pulled against his back, twelve kilometres to the Metallurgia transit station. He paid $150 in cash for a one-way ticket, and in the bathroom, he used the toilet, washed and towelled off, applied deodorant, changed into street clothes and brushed his teeth. Feeling and smelling clean and hoping he looked about as unassuming and ordinary as any black man could look in a country known for deporting every Illegal it could catch, Keita Ali boarded an intercity bus that would leave in a matter of minutes. A day-old Clarkson Post had been left on the seat he chose in the middle of the bus, and he made a point of looking at the sports pages because that seemed like something an ordinary Freedom Statonian would do. Perhaps the strategy worked. Nobody stopped, interrogated or looked at him. The bus left at the scheduled hour, although it was only half full at the time.
    It was the strangest bus ride Keita had ever taken. There were no chickens or goats aboard. There was only one passenger per seat, and no one stood in the aisles or sat among luggage on top of the bus. As a matter of fact, they didn’t even have luggage on top of the bus. Keita stowed his knapsack in a space above his seat.
    Not a single person sang or laughed or danced during the twenty-six-hour trip. Nobody turned on a transistor radio; in fact, no one seemed to carry one. No strangers met, argued about politics, shared a sandwich or discovered that they were distant relatives. Keita looked out the windows anxiously: Would they come up to police stations or army barracks and be halted there? Would roving bands of soldiers board the bus? There were no checkpoints along the highway, and no soldiers entered the bus to find his passport missing and wait for a bribe. Every six hours, the bus stopped at a gas station and passengers were told that they had ten minutes to get out and stretch or buy a snack. Except to relieve himself, guzzle water and refill his bottle, Keita stayed on the bus, slouched low in his seat.
    Apart from the absence of human conversation, it was the most comfortable, commodious, odourless and painless bus ride in the history of mankind. At the end of the trip, which terminated at the very hour the bus schedule had predicted, Keita and forty-nine other passengers were discharged from the vehicle. He followed the others, all of whom acted as if they were complete strangers, as if they had never travelled together or eaten side by side or slept under the very same moving roof.
    Keita Ali was anonymous, alone and about to go underground in Clarkson, population 4.5 million—the capital and the biggest city of Freedom State. Nobody knew him here. If something happened to him, nobody would think to notify his sister. Nobody would even know where to find her. Keita Ali could not afford to get caught. If he were deported, he would likely be executed. And then Charity