A Brief Conversation in the Couriers’ Waiting Room
“I saw this movie on cable just before I got here,” he said to me. I looked at the People Magazine in front of my face and realized that I was not going to have quiet. I like silence before the application, but this guy with the black T-shirt and almost shaven face was obviously new. I could sense the waves of excitement and anxiety coming from him.
I took myself from the slick pages of celebrities and smiled. “So you saw a movie this morning.”
“Yeah, yeah, I did. It was this flick about drug mules. You know drug mules. Swallowing balloons of dope and flying into the States.”
“I know what drug mules are. I saw a movie about them too,” I said.
He leaned in to me and his breath reeked of garlic and misuse. “So these guys swallow like forty of them, sometimes coated in honey to help it go down, because it’s a tough swallow.”
“Yeah, that’s what it looked like in the movie I saw too.”
The guy didn’t say anything, just stared at me, as if waiting for me to say something else. I couldn’t think of anything else to say so I picked up the magazine again and he finally spoke. “So, uhm, is this like that?”
“This?” I asked. “The application?”
“Uh, yeah, I mean they told me that we have to swallow a lot of them before we’re ready to travel. Like we’re mules.”
“It’s different, man. I mean, they’re just swallowing balloons. Balloons don’t wiggle, they don’t kick going down your throat.”
His eyes pinpricked and he whispered, “They kick.”
“Course they kick. You think that a plague of evil going down your throat ain’t going to be a little hostile in the process?”
“So are they like bugs? Are we swallowing bugs?”
“No, they’re demons. and don’t you call them bugs while they’re resting in your belly. If you want to keep your belly. They might be called Satan’s Locusts, but they got royalty about them. They think so at any rate, and you’d be smart to agree.”
“How do we get them out of you when we get to the assigned city?”
“Don’t worry about that. They’ll let you know. Just open up your mouth, close your eyes and ride the pain. There is a lot of pain, but anyone they recruited for this has got to be aware of that. Pain.”
“What happens when they’re released?”
“I don’t really know. Havoc. Death. Stuff.”
The guy, who was looking younger and younger to me, put on a brave grin. “So how long have you been doing this line of work?”
“I don’t really know. Time gets kind of misplaced. I can tell you that this is my seventeenth trip.” This silenced him. I don’t why, but it did. So I got to pick up the copy of People and look at the happy faces. I don’t think I ever read it, I just gaze at it. Soon enough, the man from the application room came in still wearing his surgical greens. I always wished he would put on fresh ones, ones not splattered in blood, but I guess that kind of nicety never occurs to him. The name he called was the guy, the new one. The guy went in slowly. He didn’t even glance my way.
I was staring at the wall, bored, when the screaming started. I didn’t even get any vicarious glee out of the new guy’s pain. Because the truth was, soon enough, the screaming would be mine.