The World in Half Read Online Free PDF Page B

people hurrying all together in the same direction, like a school of fish darting through the terminal. I walk with them, gripping the strap of my orange bag, half reading the backlit advertisements for hotels and travel excursions and banks that hang on the walls. It looks like any airport. Not that I’ve been to one before today. But it’s not so different from O’Hare or Hobby. Maybe the lighting is dimmer. The furniture is older.
    At the passport vestibules, everyone sorts instinctively into two lines: one for Panamanian citizens and one for everyone else. I get in the line with everyone else. I know it’s where I’m supposed to be. Of course it is. But I can’t help looking at the Panamanians who snake their way through the stanchions—women carrying woven-plastic bags, women wearing gold jewelry, men with leather shoes and mustaches, men in linen shirts, everyone’s skin darker than mine—and feeling a twinge of displacement, as if almost, maybe, I could be in that line with them. I’m not sure why, but I want them to know that. I want them to know that I’m not just any tourist visiting their country, that I have a claim to this place and a reason for being here, that I belong to them, at least a little bit. I wonder whether, or how, they would treat me differently if they knew.
    When I get to the scratched Plexiglas window, the man on the other side peers at me under heavy eyelids. He opens my passport and stamps—thud, thud, flips a page, thud, the rhythm of my pounding heart—then slides the passport and my tourist card back under the window.
    In a way it’s amazing that I even have a passport. Until now I’ve never once had the fortune to use it. The year I turned sixteen, I begged my mother for a passport as a birthday present. She drove me to Circus Joe’s Burger Palace and sat me in the old-fashioned photo booth they had by the register and told me to smile. The bulb flashed four times. “This was cheaper than going to Walgreens,” she said, when I came out.
    “What do you mean?” I asked. Somehow, I didn’t realize that she had brought me there to get my official passport photo. I had been pestering her for a passport, sure, but she hadn’t given any indication that she was actually going to get me one. I thought that we were merely going to Circus Joe’s for a birthday lunch, and that when she sent me into the photo booth it was for a commemorative birthday snapshot.
    “The post office is even worse. They should be ashamed of what they charge for a passport photo.”
    “This can’t be my photo,” I said.
    “We haven’t seen them yet. I’m sure they’re fine.”
    “No, I mean it has to be official. Circus Joe’s isn’t official.”
    My mother stared at me. A giant plastic elephant, lion, and bear stood frozen in parade through the middle of the restaurant. Then, a strip of photographs came sliding forth, as if the booth was sticking its tongue out at us. My mother bent down slowly and plucked the strip out of the tray. “I know that,” she said evenly. “I just thought you might need a warm-up.” Without another word, she stuffed the narrow band of black-and-white photos into her purse, and strode out to the car. She drove us straight to Walgreens.
    Several weeks later, after we also went to the post office to fill out the required papers, I received in the mail a beautiful gold-stamped navy booklet. By then, my mother was long past the embarrassment of her mistake, and she came into my room smiling, holding the passport aloft, and told me, “Happy Birthday, Mira.” I spent that entire afternoon cutting out silhouettes of the countries I longed to visit—Iceland, Mongolia, France, Egypt—and sticking the pieces, like paper fish, between the pages of the booklet. The first one I cut out, of course, was Panama. I’ve been holding on to my passport, waiting for the day I would use it, ever since.
     
     
     
    Hotel Centro is the cheapest lodging listed in the guidebook