Emergency

by Neil Strauss

  And that afternoon, I had my final meeting with a member of the race of man dedicated to the mastery of that paper: my lawyer.

  “I can deal with bastards, but I hate assholes,” Maxwell was telling someone on the phone when I entered. “Some people, they shouldn’t be dealt with nicely.”

  When he hung up, I tried to make small talk and asked how his holiday had been so far. This was a mistake.

  “I’ve been working the whole time. I can’t take a vacation like you.” He seemed to feel he was the only person in the world who had to work. “It’s because of this thing.” He pointed to the mobile phone hanging from his belt. “It never stops.”

  I pulled the forms he’d given me out of an envelope I was carrying. I’d filled in my name, address, and my parents’ address. But other questions—asking for my occupation, annual income, and reason for wanting the citizenship—I’d left blank, because I had no idea what the government was looking for. If it wanted to attract rich investors to the island, it would probably reject me because I was just a writer and my income was nothing in comparison with the business magnates and Russian mobsters who usually applied for citizenship. So I asked Maxwell for advice.

  “Is it better to put writer or author?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “How should I describe my source of income?”

  “They just need a guarantee that you have an income.”

  “Okay. One last question, then I’m out of your hair: what should I put down where it asks ‘reason seeking citizenship’?”

  He groaned as if he’d rather be in Guantánamo getting tortured and uttered with great effort, “‘Alternative citizenship and future retirement home.’”

  As I filled out the rest of the application, he yelled something about making a mistake on my invoice at a beleaguered secretary, who was wearing inordinately high red peep-toe shoes. She returned a few moments later with the largest bill I’d ever been handed in my life:

  I didn’t have that kind of money lying around.

  “I’ll need you to wire that to my account,” Maxwell informed me, “along with the full cost of the apartment.”

  “I thought I was just supposed to pay a ten percent deposit.” Cold sweat began prickling my forehead and the back of my neck.

  “The government likes to see all the money in an account so they know you won’t back out.”

  Until that moment, I hadn’t given much thought to the practicalities of affording the citizenship. Perhaps if I took out a second mortgage on my current home, I might be able to raise that amount. Then I could take care of the monthly mortgage payments by renting out the unit when I wasn’t on the island. So not only would I become a citizen of St. Kitts, I’d also become a foreign real-estate speculator and shady landlord.

  But it was still a devastating amount of money. What if I was a victim in some sort of long con? Maxwell had the home-team advantage. I was completely at the mercy of his word.

  He irritably shuffled through my documents and handed me a piece of paper that would, hopefully, become my passport one day. “Write your name inside the box, but make sure it doesn’t go outside the box,” he told me, then repeated it, as if I were stupid.

  “In order to submit your application,” he continued, “I’ll also need a negative HIV test, a clean police record, nine passport photos, and a copy of your birth certificate.”

  I handed him the lease agreement for St. Christopher Club and asked him if it was okay to sign.

  “I did all the documentation for St. Christopher Club,” he replied, as if offended I’d dare to ask such a question.

  “So you wrote this agreement, then?”

  A vertical tremor in his face seemed to imply his assent. This was quite possibly the stupidest thing I’d done in my life.

  “So,” I asked, hoping for more reassurance than at my last visit, “what’s the likelihood of this going through?”

  “As long as you have no criminal record, a clean HIV test, and no tax problems in the U.S., you’re fine,” he replied.

  “Anything else ever go wrong?”

  “As long as you have no criminal record, a clean HIV test, and no tax problems in the U.S., you’re fine.”

  It was clear he just wanted me out of his office. Foolishly, I tried to make more small talk in an effort to befriend him. “Hope you get some free time in.”

  “I have another client coming,” he responded. “Can I ask you to leave?”

  I walked out with a sinking feeling in my chest.

  In the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, just before making a fateful decision, one character says to another, “There must be a principle: never do anything that can’t be undone.”

  That principle is why, on the brink of a big decision, the first thing to fill my mind is doubt. What separates the strong from the weak, I reminded myself as I wandered sticker-shocked through the streets of Basseterre, is the ability to act instead of spending most of life paralyzed, too scared to make a choice that might be wrong.

  St. Slim Jim, patron saint of reckless decisions.

  That night, weakness struck. In a few days, I’d be committed to an expense of over half a million dollars, which was more money than I had.

  And what was it all for? Symbolic paper. A passport, which is just a teeny little booklet that means nothing to the universe. Realistically, the world wasn’t likely to end in my lifetime. And if it did, everyone on St. Kitts would be just as dead as everyone in America.

  If there were a smaller-scale world disaster, things would probably be even worse on an island in the Caribbean, where I was more likely to be a victim of food shortages, droughts, hurricanes, blackouts, and tsunamis. There’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide on an island—especially one in the smallest country in the Americas. I’d become so focused on my search for a passport—so consumed with escaping the blowback of American politics—that I’d forgotten the survivalist lessons I’d learned on Y2K and 9/11.

  Soon, the whole endeavor began to seem like the biggest travesty ever. If something horrible happened in America, would a St. Kitts passport even get me out during a state of emergency? What if it was confiscated by customs agents? Or what if Victor, Maxwell, and Wendell were in collusion and just ripping me off? I didn’t have anyone to protect me here.

  Once I’d ridden out that wave of anxiety, a new one formed. I began worrying that I’d blabbed my name and occupation to too many people. If they Googled me and saw the filth I’d written, they might not sell me the apartment or give me a citizenship. And then I’d be stuck in America if anything bad happened.

  And so it went, all night, one wave of anxiety after another—half of them spent worrying that I wouldn’t get a passport, the other half spent worrying that I would.

  I fell asleep around dawn for a few fitful hours, until I was woken by my cell phone. AIG Private Bank was finally returning my call.

  Every day, my small savings were dwindling as the dollar dropped relative not just to the euro, but even to the Caribbean currency here. I never thought I’d see the day when Eastern Europeans came to the United States for the cheap shopping.

  “I’d like to inquire about opening a private banking account,” I told the woman.

  “Great,” she said, with barely a trace of a Swiss accent. “Let me ask you a few questions.”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you an American citizen?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “We don’t deal with American citizens for a few years now.”

  “But my friend Spencer Booth is American, and I think he has an account with you.”

  “It’s likely an older account. We don’t do business with American citizens anymore. Sorry, good-bye.”

  Before I could respond, she had hung up. I felt like an outcast. I couldn’t believe a bank wouldn’t take my money solely because I was American.

  I’d noticed that many of the banks I’d researched had special policies for dealing with United States citizens.
Even some of the online companies selling vintage travel documents said they no longer shipped to America because U.S. customs agents were opening and confiscating the packages. The government seemed to be sticking its nose everywhere.

  In the meantime, I’d discovered a few other interesting facts: According to a report issued by Reporters Without Borders, the United States was ranked as having the fifty-third freest press in the world, tied with Botswana and Croatia. According to the World Health Organization, the United States had the fifty-fourth fairest health care system in the world, with lack of medical coverage leading to an estimated 18,000 unnecessary deaths a year. And according to the Justice Department, one in every thirty-two Americans was in jail, on probation, or on parole.

  Rather than having actual freedom, it seemed that, like animals in a habitat in the zoo, we had only the illusion of freedom. As long as we didn’t try to leave the cage, we’d never know we weren’t actually free.

  That phone call was all it took to let me know I was doing the right thing.

  Before going home, I had dinner with Wendell at a restaurant called Fisherman’s Wharf and thanked him for his help.

  After the meal, he patted my shoulder and smiled. “Next time I see you, you’ll be a citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis just like me,” he said. “When you get married, your wife will be a citizen. And when you have kids, so will they.”

  He stepped into his SUV, started the engine, then unrolled the window and concluded his thought: “One day,” he said, beaming, “when you come back to America, no one will recognize you. You’ll be a Kittitian.”

  At the St. Kitts airport the next morning, I felt like I was returning not to a country but a fortress. “Your country is so tough to get into,” the ticket agent complained as she checked my documents for the flight home. “They make it so hard for us.”

  She looked up at me and said it louder, almost with venom, as if it were my fault. “They make it so hard for us.”

  She wasn’t alone in her opinion. A survey released the previous month by the Discover America Partnership had found that international travelers considered America the least-friendly country to visit.

  “That’s why,” I told her, with the newfound pride that Wendell had instilled in me, “I’m moving here.”

  I flew back to Los Angeles, determined to gather the material I needed for my citizenship application as quickly as possible.

  To obtain my criminal record, I sent a letter to the FBI, along with a set of rolled-ink fingerprints and a certified check for eighteen dollars. The government claimed that it wouldn’t keep my prints on file after the process was complete, and I hoped this was true. Though I didn’t plan on committing any crimes, there may come a time when I want to escape with my second passport, and I wouldn’t want my fingerprints to give my identity away.

  Perhaps I was more like the paranoiacs at the Sovereign Society conference than I cared to admit.

  To get my passport pictures, I visited a small photography services store in Koreatown. “Don’t smile,” the owner instructed me. “The government doesn’t like smiling in them these days.”

  Between the black shirt I was wearing and the grim expression on my face, I looked like just the kind of mobster who would create a new identity in St. Kitts.

  My next errand was the HIV test. I found it strange that AIDS was the only disease the Kittitian government worried about. And though I was always safe, the problem with health exams is that they open possibilities one doesn’t consider before taking them. After all, every test has the possibility of being failed. If I were HIV-positive, then this whole attempt to save myself would be pointless. In the grand scheme of things, health trumps nationality every time.

  Fortunately, my white blood cells were as clean as my criminal record.

  My last task was the one I dreaded most: paying the bill. I called the mortgage agent who’d helped me get my home in L.A. She sent an appraiser to my house, estimated the value, and loaned me the money I needed, no questions asked. This was before the mortgage market crashed and she was forced to fire her staff, sell her dream home, and watch helplessly as her annual income dropped from seven figures to five.

  Rather than being exciting, the loan was terrifying. If my quest was for freedom, going deeper into debt was the worst way to attain it.

  Finally, I put everything in an envelope and sent it to Maxwell, hoping he wouldn’t abscond with the money and go golfing somewhere. My future lay in his hands.

  As I waited for him to submit the application, I continued my search for a Swiss bank account. After getting shut down by AIG, I’d contacted half a dozen other banks in Switzerland. Every one of them had also turned me down. So I decided to dig deeper and figure out why no one would take my money.

  I began calling every Swiss bank I could, until I finally found one that accepted clients from the United States. The name of the institution: Arab Bank. Unfortunately, it didn’t accept initial deposits of less than half a million dollars.

  Frustrated, I pulled out my notes from the Sovereign Society conference and called the Swiss branch of Jyske Bank.

  “I’d like to open an account for you, but if we take a U.S. citizen, we risk your government closing our banks in the United States,” a male employee named Kim informed me. “But we have clients from one hundred and eighty countries, so at least we can still serve one hundred and seventy-nine of them.”

  “Why won’t anyone do business with Americans?”

  A few years ago, Kim explained, the United States started requiring Swiss banks to designate the American government a “qualified intermediary”—which means that the bank has to report information on American clients to the U.S. government, withhold a percentage of interest paid to the account, and file tax forms with the IRS. In addition, the U.S. now required Swiss banks to register with the Securities Exchange Commission if they wanted to do business with American citizens.

  Jyske chose not to register, Kim said, because “it will compromise secrecy.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Bank privacy for a U.S. citizen, like many other freedoms, was basically a thing of the past.

  “It’s a strange time to be an American,” I told him.

  “It definitely is.” I felt like he wasn’t just saying that to be polite, but he actually sympathized.

  Spencer had once given me a list of signs that meant it was time to leave a country. They included the government sealing its borders, banning the press, or forbidding citizens to move money offshore. The Nazi regime, for example, made it illegal to have foreign accounts. One of the reasons the Swiss originally drafted bank secrecy laws was that three Germans were executed after the Nazis discovered they held foreign bank accounts.

  “Can you do business with people from St. Kitts?” I asked Kim before hanging up.

  “Of course.”

  “Good to know.”

  As the weeks passed and I waited to hear from Maxwell, I wondered what else I needed to do to prepare for a future visible only through gathering storm clouds.

  Guns. Planes. Submarines.

  Spencer’s words kept coming back to me. And though I wasn’t about to take a third mortgage on my house to buy a submarine, perhaps I was avoiding the real work. Because it meant reinventing not just my nationality, but reinventing myself.

  Guns. Planes. Submarines.

  It meant not just becoming like those I made fun of, but becoming even more extreme than them.

  Guns. Planes. Submarines.

  I wasn’t that crazy. I’d found my island paradise. That was all I needed. Or so I thought—until the smallest disaster in the world changed my mind.

  St. Christopher Club, St. Kitts, 2007

  I am writing this on the dying battery of my computer. It’s been several months since I first visited this island and, though I have a place to live here now, I still don’t have my citizenship.

  There was another blackout tonight. There are no backup generators, and the emergency lig
hts only last fifteen or so minutes.

  All the food in my refrigerator has spoiled again, and not only do I not have any matches for the candles, but I don’t know where to get any.

  It’s a holiday today, and everything nearby is closed. I don’t have a car, because the rental companies don’t have any left. I know this because I called every single one of them yesterday.

  I hear footsteps in the hallway and voices outside. If someone came up here, it wouldn’t be hard to break in. There’s just a flimsy lock, like on the doorknob of a bathroom.

  I don’t know if I have any neighbors. I haven’t seen a person in the complex the whole time I’ve been here, outside of the local workers, who always seem to be around.

  The apartment is on the flat part of the island, a little stretch of a square mile or two called Frigate Bay, home to most of the resorts and casinos and tourists. On the hill overlooking us is Basseterre, where the locals live in small town-houses and shanties. There are gangs there, and crime and murder.

  The snap can occur here too, just as it can in the United States, just as it has in the past in Haiti and China and the Ivory Coast. One little snap—be it due to hunger, unemployment, propaganda, or simple resentment—and they’d all come running down here with the machetes they once used to harvest sugarcane. It would be over in a matter of minutes.

  The police wouldn’t help us. They, too, live up on the hill. And their loyalty is to the hill, not to the rich foreigners who treat them like servants.

  The American government wouldn’t help us, because it is far away and I am a traitor.

  There is only one solution if I am to stay here: I will have to stock up.

  Spencer was right. I’ve become so obsessed with repatriating that I haven’t been looking at the big picture. A passport will help me escape, but it won’t help me survive. I can’t eat it, drink it, or defend myself with it. I can only run with it.