Nomad Codes

loss of your body, or at least with its relative autonomy and comfort. Lined up and forcibly unshod and radiated and patted down, your body is no longer your own, even before it reaches its final in-flight resting place, a seat that demands medieval metaphors—monk’s cell, Iron Maiden, rack. Even before you strap yourself in to the mercy seat, a subtler torture of the spirit is provided by your journey through the first class cabin. This brief march through the Elysian fields of leg room and free booze goads the envious into remorse as it restores the otherwise forgotten theological category of the elect .
    This is where my recent bardo trip really began. I was sitting in my coach seat on American flight 2614, waiting for the doors to close, when a young woman wearing some vaguely official garb walked up the aisle, asked if I was Erik Davis, then beckoned me to follow her off the plane. In the gangway I met two young Costa Rican men in plain clothes, with ordinary airport security badges dangling around their necks. One asked if I spoke Spanish (“un poquito”), and the other mumbled something about my “madre.” My bafflement now mutating into fear, I flashed on the worst case scenario: my mother is dead, and these functionaries are here to break the news.
    Seeing my concern, the young woman clarified that the gentlemen were after my mother’s maiden name, which I gave them, along with the demand that they explain why they cared to know. Her English was not much better than my Spanish, but she explained that my name was on a Costa Rican no-fly list. I asked for clarification from one of the men, but he just smiled nervously as his partner got on the phone to, apparently, pass on the proverbial name. I wrote down my own given name, underlining the “k”—the sole mark of distinction in an otherwise generic name—but he just smiled and scribbled a “c” alongside the k. The other guy got off the phone, and I started to get mad. Then the first fellow grinned again, shook his head and said “Okay, okay, no problem.” They ushered me back on the plane, leaving me and my buddies to ponder the imponderables. Whose “no-fly” list? Did they actually have a record of my mother’s maiden name? Why would they think I wouldn’t just lie? All of which really boiled down to one question:
    What the fuh ...?
    It seemed as if all those Philip K. Dick novels were coming home to roost, and if the rest of the journey was more of your typical commercial airline hell, it remained permeated with the woozy disorientation caused by mistaken identity and the arbitrariness of the archons who rule these transit zones.
    My nausea was hardly alleviated by the greasy nuts and the Diet Coke and the Barney songs that cackled from some tyke’s portable DVD player in the next row. Meanwhile, terrible and unusual storms—you know, the kind that are now business as usual—forced us to circle over Dallas awhile before we landed and sat on the tarmac for almost an hour, first to allow the gate to clear, and second to allow the lightning strikes that froze ground service to make their way elsewhere.
    We made it through customs and immigration quite quickly, despite the general chaos the storm had brought to American’s hub. We soon discovered that our flight to San Francisco had been cancelled, and lined up to talk to one of the two—count’em—two service agents who had been dealing with this shit all day. As our fellow searched for an alternate route—finally setting us on a flight to Reno and a U.S. Airways hop to S.F. the next morning, which he nonetheless screwed up in ways I will not bother to recount—the line behind us grew and grew. Soon scores of frantic, fatigued, and harried customers stood and fidgeted, frustrated and angry, a line of refugees that grew into an anxious mob. I had not thought a single storm could have undone so many.
    I will not continue to detail the slings and arrows that still lay in store for us, though it’s important to mention that they included panicked dashes, confiscated shaving cream, lost luggage, telephone hold lines that switched impishly into dial tones, booked hotels, room 666, and a host of largely lame encounters with service agents and other dwellers of the threshold, most of whom were incompetent and frazzled, and a few of whom were so kind and helpful that they seemed almost angelic.
    Suffice it to say that the only redemption lay in seeing it all as the bardo, whose deepest