Mayday! Mayday!

 I started to become more aware of my senses on May 21, 2010 when I saw the border guard of my nightmares at the airport in Bucharest, Romania.  It set off a chain of events that ended with me here and now, working on the project detailed in the About section.

I had just flown in from Austria and was waiting in line with a hundred other people to get my passport stamped. I had rushed off the plane so only seven people were ahead of me in the line, splitting off in three queues to have their passports stamped by one of the guards.

I was returning from a four-day trip to Vienna, a pleasant, clean city I hadn’t seen for years. I had last visited Vienna, several times, on breaks from writing about war for The Associated Press. Vienna was the regional office for The Associated Press coverage of the multiple wars in the Balkans. Wiener schnitzel, and the entire city, for me, had been painfully associated with recovery from the shell shock of massacres and artillery fire.

But on this trip, the relaxed stay in Vienna helped cleanse myself of the images of the months I had spent with guerrillas so many years ago - images of massacres, torture and deprivation. Images and words that went direct from my laptop to the New York Times, Newsweek, Life Magazine, and straight to Bill Clinton’s desk. My photos and words had forced me to flee the former Yugoslavia, evicted. In my calm stay in Vienna, I felt that eviction would never happen again.

The latest trip to Vienna, years after the time of troubles, was prompted by Roxana, my lovely girlfriend, who has her head office there. She was going for a work stint. I thought I would tag along and write in the cafes and bars of Austria to finish my last book (which I will announce later).

On my return to Bucharest, I knew my residency card had expired and I had already accumulated more than my allotted time as a “tourist” in Romania over the past six months. Technically, a border guard could deport me. But that would never happen. I had been in Romania for five years and was personally acquainted with past and present prime ministers and presidents of the country, Senators and others and I regularly wrote about local economics and politics for a global audience. Most importantly, my five-year-old daughter was waiting for me somewhere on the other side of the gates. Nobody would be so callous as to separate us on a mere technicality. I had also just formed a company in Romania and transferred all my assets to an exclusively Romanian bank. I had not even yet received the bank cards for my accounts and kicking me out would leave me destitute and homeless. In any case, my overstay was minor and I had a meeting scheduled that very afternoon in Bucharest to renew my expired permanent residency card.

I had learned to read people pretty well from first impressions in the two years that I was researching my first book, which was closely related to, of all things, reading people pretty well from first impressions. I had also spent 20 years crossing borders in South America, Africa, Southeast Asia, North America, western and eastern Europe and everywhere else that border guards exist as a species.

And my first impression of that border guard on my return to Romania was pretty God-awful.

 Twin tear-drop scars on either side of his jowls gave him a permanent frown, like a scary smiley. But it was the eyes that betrayed a smouldering anger, seeking a scapegoat for the problem that had ailed him that cold morning. He seemed a tad less than happy.

As the line shrank, I prayed I would be reviewed by the young blonde guard to his left, or by the elderly, overweight fellow to his right. Even if they noticed I was a bit overdue for a new permanent residency visa, they would wave me past. After all, I had the papers in my hand to prove my visa was forthcoming.

As I reached second in line, the woman before me got the blonde guard.

And then I reached the front.

Scary Smiley waved me forward with a beckoning right hand.

I dropped my laptop bag and pretended to fumble for my passport, trying to persuade the Romanian couple behind me to take my place with the devil guard. They, and he, would have none of it.

So I stepped up.

Scary Smiley spent several minutes with my Canadian passport. Then, in a “eureka” moment, he grinned for the first time. He stamped something that looks like a crosshairs over an airplane on page 8. Then, for emphasis, he etched a bold F in black marker and showed it to me.

And my world crumbled.

He might as well have written “off” behind the “F.”

F, in indecipherable border guard speak, meant I would have to leave the country, abandon my bank accounts indefinitely, leave my girlfriend alone, vacate the park-side apartment we had just furnished, quit my job which depended on me being in Romania and leave my daughter who, months later, is still afraid I will never come home. (By phone, she suggested I dress up as a vampire and fly in the middle of the night to see her. The guards, she had learned in her wonderful pre-school world, would be too afraid to stop me).

I was accompanied to an isolation tank and forced to choose between one of the next several flights out. I chose London.

Later, Scary Smiley consulted with his superiors and apologized. He said he had been too harsh. But the stamp was irrevocable and I would have to spend six months destitute, wandering the globe, separated from my daughter.

At least, I thought, the brief wait to be deported will give me enough time so I can get my luggage off the Vienna flight and land in London with a change of clothes and a toothbrush.

No! I then found out that the discount air line Blue Air had misplaced my suitcase. Strike two. I was banished with nothing but my laptop.

I have friends in London and I used to live there so I figured I could still survive.

Four hours later, as I was taking the train from the airport in London to King’s Cross Station, I sent a text message to my close friend Colin. He lived in London but had just moved to Singapore. I told him that I had just become homeless and jobless.

“Be very careful Adam,” he replied from the sunshine of Singapore, rather unhelpfully. “Bad things come in threes.”

1 – I had just been deported. 2 – I had lost my luggage. 3 – What else?

My first stop in London was a Starbucks. Force of habit made me spend some of my dwindling cash on a take-out Tall Americano coffee, black.

I didn’t see, though, that the lip of the plastic cup cover had been torn and shaped into a jagged scalpel. It cut my tongue deeply, right down the groove in the center.

At first, strolling down the streets of central London on the unusually sunny May day, I believed the cut would heal itself. But it kept bleeding. And bleeding.

Nine hours later, dizzy from blood loss, an emergency room doctor had me sit with my mouth wide open while firmly pressing a patch of gauze laced with adrenalin on my tongue. The adrenalin, he said, would encourage the vessels to close and stop the bleeding. I sat there, hand in mouth, for two hours. And I thought …

Less than 24 hours earlier, I was eating trout pate, toothpicks of garlic sausage and sipping red wine in Vienna while finishing my first book and planning on a brilliant, relaxing future with Roxana in a newly decorated home in a lakeside neighbourhood in northern Bucharest.

Now, I was homeless, jobless, destitute, toothbrush-less AND hospitalized with an injury that just wouldn’t heal. I remember mumbling to the nurse, with a mouthful of blood, that I had no money to pay for treatment. Luckily, emergency-room treatment was free.

Then it happened – the inkling of what was to come.

I would like to say that I suddenly started laughing at my misfortune and saw the world afresh. But clichés irk me to distraction. Anyway, I was too busy nurturing the ever-moistening scab on my tongue to open my mouth for a laugh.

It happened when the doctor gave me a choice. He could stitch my tongue up with, or without, anaesthetic. Either way, he said in his sing-song Filipino accent, my bleeding problems would end.

Roxana had just flown to London, signing off work, to be with me. Most importantly, she brought her credit cards. She soothed me as the doctor spoke. I stretched back on the surgery table and closed my eyes, letting my feet dangle off the edge, relaxing with the blessing of gravity.

The overhead light shone through my eyelids like the blissful first moments of holiday on the beach. The chatter of nurses and doctors came briefly to the fore – the sounds of delightful people about their daily chores.

I could almost feel the watchfulness of Roxana, a green-eyed gaze that ensured the doctors only did their best. Her presence charms everybody – so much so that I made her charm an object of study for the past year.

In my mouth, I could still taste the coffee and blood – a rich, full-bodied, iron-laden sampling of the last 24 hours of my life. I could still taste the adrenalin that had been soaked into the gauze. It may be tasteless to many but, to me, it had the sharpness of Stilton cheese and the pucker of white wine vinegar without having any effect on the actual tongue. It was a taste sensation without any discernible taste.

Taste, hearing, touch, smell and sight mesmerized. Every goose bump, the stroke of Roxana’s fingertips on my calves, the jovial tones vibrating in high notes from the doctor’s larynx, the thump of the border guard’s stamp, the smooth indented grooves of my eviction notice on page 8, the fingertip-feel of the bumpy faux leather cover of my passport, the body odor of the crowded airport, the dry medley of perfumes, sprays and air conditioning on the airplanes, the light of the fading sun flirting with hospital fluorescents, the soothing powder blue of the scrubs, the metallic taste of blood, the wakening brace of gauze.

It was a moment of bliss amid chaos – like a meditation session in a war zone. I had only felt it once before – and that was, not so surprisingly, during a meditation session in a war zone (More on that later).

That terrible day – starting with my deportation from my home and ending in the hospital – surpassed the body and encompassed the psyche, massaging five senses.

And then, by my request, the doctor pricked a needle deep into the fleshiest part of my tongue.

The senses, bad and good, are life.

That moment of heightened senses set me on a path that would only hit with full force almost three months later.

Before we get there, though, I must continue my story.

(This is Part 1 of a Six-Part Series. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)