Department of Student Loans, Kidnap & Ransom

by Christian Hale

  *****

  Walking through San Diego International Airport, The Executioner looked for the gate of his transfer flight to Vancouver.

  Getting closer to his gate, he could hear it: the unmistakable sound of Canada’s newest crop of moderately wealthy entrepreneurs. At a distance, it sounded like a particularly agitated pack of hyenas, hysterical with laughter. As he got closer, The Executioner could start to make out the sounds of individuals, each chirping loudly in a very animated manner.

  Standing near the gate, the Canadians’ conversations came into focus. However, the conversations could not be described as back-and-forth exchanges, but rather monologues, with each person shouting past the other while ignoring the other side of the conversation: “I own a place in La Jolla, right on the beach…,” “I golfed at the best course in…,” “I sold my condo in Whistler and bought a place in Encinitas as well as a property in the desert near…,” “I got an American girlfriend down here, but my kids don’t like her, so I…,” “I bought a boat for my place on Lake Havasu, and then I flipped it for a profit a year later to some guy from Alberta, and now I…,” etcetera.

  ‘I, I, me, me,’ and the occasional ‘we.’ But almost never a ‘you.’

  The Canadian men had faces that matched their voices: their skin was bronzed and their teeth were bleached. Their faces were frozen in permanent Cheshire Cat grins, while the women’s faces were paralyzed unsmiling in the grip of their most recent skin tightening operation. Both genders appeared to have spent at least half an hour on their hair.

  But one gender predominated. Only half of the men were with their Canadian partner. The rest had just taken leave of their young and vulnerable American girlfriends after having dispensed enough Canadian dollars to tide them over until their return. The most attractive of the American women in the tourist areas of California and the American southwest, outside of the small elite upper class, were now often the somewhat willing mail-order brides of the mid 21st century, desperately looking for a middle aged Canadian or European man to snatch up yet another foreclosed home at auction and provide them with an apartment or house where they could live comfortably, like a waiting mistress.

  Off to the side of the boarding area, doing their best to separate themselves from the cackling horde of British Columbians and Albertans, were those Canadians who had, until arriving at the airport, managed to avoid coming into contact with this undesirable class of their compatriots. Quiet and calm, they certainly did not spend their holidays revving the throttle on any sort of machine, whether waterborne or confined to land. These ‘other’ Canadians were wiry, fit and had spent exactly zero minutes on their hair that morning. Their time in California and Arizona had been passed in kayaks, desert canyons, climbing pitches, and on remote trails. And their nights had been spent in tents or at organic farm B&Bs; not at condos, all-inclusive resorts, or McMansions. They were superior, and they knew it. Their social status was demonstrated by not showing off their social status like those Canadians who were now rushing to the gate, having heard the call for the ‘Elite Ultra Platinum’ ticket holders to begin boarding.

  Sitting in the plane, The Executioner began to ponder his chore in Canada. He was annoyed that he had to take the initiative himself and pay for the intel on the imposter debt collector. The tracking service he contracted charged a lot, and it was taking money out of the start-up fund that he had set aside for the planned kidnap business. It would have been so much cheaper and easier if Marv had shown a real interest and taken care of finding the annoying new competitor. But The Executioner had decided to keep this trip to himself.

  The Executioner thought about the task at hand. It had never presented itself as a difficult goal, just an expensive one. The imitation executioner was clearly young and not very well-traveled. The younger generation in America was clueless about managing their identity and affairs online. They were pathetic in their attempts to access info, and they increasingly did not know how to be anonymous and untraceable. It was the first generation of Americans that the government had managed to control in regards to their internet activities. Kids these days were even paying for movies online.

  Turning his attention to the operating environment, The Executioner decided to briefly read-up on Canada. He had never really thought about the country before, except for a quick check on the Canadian status of the anarchists and Blue Team. Canada was sort of just there, innocuous and unthreatening. Reading through some brief intros to Canada, he focused on the ones written by Americans as guides for fellow American refugees, debt runners and labor migrants.

  Canada soon came into focus as a country that, in many ways, was a mirror to the United States. And like America, it had a problem with its urban/rural divide. It was not only demographics and numbers, but a cultural disconnect. In America it had been the prosperous coastal cities with ‘Fly-over Country’ in between. Money had increasingly flowed towards the business elites and the government on the East Coast and the cities close to the Pacific Ocean, leaving decaying infrastructure and failing government and communities throughout Fly-over Country.

  In Canada, roughly the same process occurred, but starting from a later date and not in such an extreme manner. Here the divide was referred to by the media as MTV versus the ROC. MTV was Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, all three slowly, inexorably moving toward the status of independent and wealthy city states. The ROC was the ‘Rest of Canada,’ irrelevant and hardly worth mentioning, despite most of the wealth being derived from natural resources there. While the ‘Rest of Canada’ had originally been used to describe English-speaking Canada as opposed to Quebec, it now came to denote all of Canada outside of the major international hubs that were fortunate enough to have NBA franchises. But the Rest of Canada, sad as it was, still had a living standard so far above the American average that not only Latin Americans attempted the border crossing into Canada, but American citizens themselves.

  Life in the Rest of Canada was not worth living, according to the cultural elite of Canada, but it was a suitable place for American doctors to ply their trade, as Canadian doctors refused to work there. Canada wanted America’s medical professionals, and occasionally a specific type of engineer when the economic demands of the day called for it. But most other Americans were considered undesirable. They were a burden. It had started well over a decade earlier when large numbers of American ‘losers,’ as they were memorably referred to in one Parliamentary debate, made good on their promise to ‘move to Canada’ after yet another presidential candidate from the wrong side of the aisle was elected. They were, however, people who could offer next to nothing to Canada’s economy or society. Canada already had its own slacker class of malcontent middle class white youth who were unhappy with everything and in love with themselves.

  Not impressed with the new class of illegal immigrants, Canadians eventually gave in and adopted the international term of ‘cockroach’ for Americans. As the Canadian Prime Minister had stated recently, after his approval rating had dropped to a personal all-time low of 24%, “The cockroaches have destroyed their own country. Why should we let them come here illegally to destroy ours?” His approval rating jumped immediately to 36%, which was good enough to secure an overwhelming parliamentary majority in the next election.

  After testing life in their northern neighbor, many Americans left Canada on their own, disillusioned by the weather, their low social status and the struggle to survive on Canadian minimum wage. Furthermore, the shock of meeting redneck Canadians, mean police, and evangelical Christians north of the border was too much for the young Americans who had mistakenly believed that Canada would be their utopia. The exception was in British Columbia, where the general laziness and blasé attitude of the younger locals, combined with a lack of obvious difference in dialect, allowed the cockroaches to blend in without too much trouble. However, Canada eventually adopted a strict border regime and the Canada option was no longer realistic for Americans who wished to exit permanently
. But apparently the imposter executioner didn’t realize that.

  The province of British Columbia, where The Executioner was heading, was basically a big Idaho with an uncreative version of San Francisco attached to it in the form of the mega-port city of Vancouver. The interior of British Columbia and all of Alberta felt distinctly American. If there was any real difference between western Canada and the northwestern American states, it existed only in the minds of the people – and in a way that could not be described in any objective manner. The people wore the exact same clothes and drove the same trucks. They shot the same animals with the same guns. They sounded the same and they acted the same. Even the hippies, the organic farmers and the microbrewery snobs were the exact same on each side of the US-Canada border.

  America was exciting and dangerous; Canada was boring, but reliable and reasonably comfortable. That seemed to be the message The Executioner was getting from his readings. However, nobody could create an index to measure this in any scientific way. The solution, in the mind of the Canadian government, was to tell Canadians that they had an undefinable essence – and to hand out lots of free Canadian flags. Canada had reached peak Maple Leaf a decade or so back, with every corporate product festooned with a red Maple Leaf and backed up by a nationalistic ad campaign that strongly hinted at the moral, social and spiritual superiority of Canadians to the rest of the world – particularly to America. Nobody seemed to care that most of these corporations had a majority of non-Canadian shareholders, or that many of the ad campaigns were designed in New York. As for what made Canada truly unique, a patriot could not describe it; he could only feel it. An imaginary nation was born, and it was quite pleased with itself.

  The real difference, once people and culture were put aside, was that north of the border there was far better infrastructure and more effective governance. This had been the case for quite a while. Eventually the United States became an object of pity. Making comparisons of living standards, governance and infrastructure was just beating a very dead donkey. But the donkey’s carcass had long ago decomposed. So Canada quietly declared victory in its non-existent war against America. Of course, only Canada noticed.

  The Executioner read on and looked through the list of brief do’s and don’ts for the newcomer to Canada. To his surprise, ‘eh’ had long ago faded from the Canadian vernacular, confined now to elderly men in a few isolated rural areas. Like in the United States, most of the worst swear words, particularly the f-word, had become associated with the poor and uneducated. Newer generations on both sides of the border abandoned its use, and hearing it was met not with shock or offense, but with pity, disdain and disgust.

  In general, there seemed to be no real differences that The Executioner needed to worry about. Stick to ordering a local brand of beer and you will be OK in Canada. Many Canadians believed, for reasons unknown, that their beer was the best beer in the world. The rest of the world had a very different opinion, but Canada enjoyed this particular delusion.

  Walking through the Vancouver International Airport, it was clear that all arrivals from international destinations were being herded through a long and elaborate Canadian theme park, as interpreted by a consultancy firm hired by the government. Passengers were soon enveloped by a surprisingly real-looking Pacific coast rain forest, complete with waterfalls, actual trees, and projections of the various animals that lived within it. The sounds of nature at work – wind, water and animals – were possibly an attempt to soothe the foreigners in preparation for the Canadian customs and immigration officers.

  The next section of the walk-through displays exhibited the indigenous people – as the consulting firm imagined they lived several hundred years before. Walking by a mock-up of a Salish Indian village, one of the Canadians in front of The Executioner pointed to the natives preparing salmon for a smoke-house and made a remark to his travel companions about the scene lacking authenticity due to the absence of empty liquor bottles and unconscious men. The group of Canadians hooted with laughter.

  The Executioner thought back to the guide to Canada that he had read on the plane. One confusing section in the guide stated that Canadians were extremely racist against the aboriginal people who lived there. Knowing his own country’s romanticized image of Native Americans and often having been proudly told by other Americans that they were one-quarter full-blood Cherokee, he couldn’t understand where the Canadians got their hate. It seemed like something straight out of the 18th century. The guidebook merely stated that it was complicated, and that you should just accept it as a Canadian eccentricity that is found across all social classes and ideological spectrums in Canada. Canadians on the left condemned racism publically, but after a few drinks in private they reverted to the Canadian default opinion of natives.

  The nature and anthropology tour ended and the automotive seizure section began. Leading towards the Canada Border Services Agency was a full wall of luxury and street racing cars, turned into trophies and put behind glass by the Vancouver Police Department as a warning to other would-be racers. Each one was accompanied by information that included the size of the fine (huge), the jail term (surprisingly long), and a photo of the racer (Asian). Vancouver’s street racers had apparently taken to removing their license plates and outrunning the police while driving by cameras without being detected. The Executioner wondered why Vancouver didn’t have police intercept drones or trackers in everybody’s cars like in the US. He also wondered if the unattended children of Asian businessmen were the worst of Canada’s social problems.

  The two-week business visa that The Executioner purchased at great cost in Jakarta was accepted without comment and he walked into the strangely familiar foreign country of Canada. He thought again about having to pay for everything in Canada himself, but he didn’t want Marv to know he was in there. In fact, The Executioner decided that he was going to greatly reduce the amount of information he shared with him. But he still had to share his biodata with the Canadian border guards. In the next section after customs, a stern officer collected his data and a massive cash deposit, refundable when The Executioner leaves the country on-time and with his biodata matching the entry records.

  Soon afterwards, he sat on the train to downtown Vancouver watching a video screen cycle through photos and videos of rioters smashing windows, burning cars and carrying armloads of merchandise. The Vancouver police had, according to the ticker at the bottom of the screen, caught almost all of the rioters who were dumb enough to not cover their faces fully. Now they were looking only for those who had thought ahead far enough to show up for the riot with facemasks. These rioters, who seem to have gotten away with their crime, all seemed to prefer the same white skull bones on black cloth design for their masks.

  The Executioner was left confused by the display, not sure what a riot that included almost 3000 arrests could possibly be about in one of the most prosperous countries in the world. A quick check on his phone led to a wiki on the ‘Vancouver NBA Championship Game Seven Riot.’ The Executioner wondered what kind of people rioted after losing a championship. The American approach of rioting after a victory seemed far more reasonable.

  Losing interest, The Executioner turned his attention to another screen. A news channel was broadcasting a report about the parliamentary inquiry underway to investigate Canada’s increasingly poor performance in international sporting competitions. The next story featured a brief three-way debate between an economist, a real estate agent, and a racist over the issue of whether or not rich Asians’ investment purchasing of houses in Vancouver was responsible or not for the median house price creeping over $2.1 million CAD ($4.7 million USD). The final story was a local news item about robberies and thefts. The screen was filled with close up photos of crime suspects in action. They were the grimiest and most suspicious looking Caucasians that The Executioner had ever seen. But overall, the news broadcast left him with the impression that Canadian problems were rather mild.

  Looking out the window of
the train, The Executioner spotted a huge billboard. It was a public relations advertisement for Canada’s border drones. The Executioner recognized the distinctive drone that was pictured. It was a Canadrone. The slogan below it simply read: ‘Keeping Canada Safe.’ The Canadian government seemed so proud of their all-white drones, decorated with red maple leaves that could be seen from every angle – included the angle you die from, if one could actually see that far. But, spray painted across the billboard was ‘MURDER’ in red letters. The paint had dripped a little, giving the impression of flowing blood. Perhaps, thought The Executioner, not every Canadian was proud of their drones.

  He checked his phone to see how close he was to his destination. But that wasn’t necessary, as all he had to do was look out the window to see the city skyline approaching. A massive glass hive of condos rose up out of Vancouver’s downtown. The city’s core was a giant bedroom, and not much else. The Executioner was bored already. And then it started to rain.

  But the next day promised to be more interesting. He was planning on meeting the imposter executioner.