Theo Arrives in America
Written by Adam Green on Sunday the 27th of November 2011
As
Theo arrived in America,
two lights shone. One was the 'no smoking' signal above his head, the other a beacon
in his soul. The airplane cut through
the clouds into the Manhattan skyline and the
sun poured down the aperture like fast and yellow wine over the brash New York rising up
silver. He wrote in his academic notebook 'America is the resting place
towards which man has aspired since his bitter cave days. Throughout the cold eons, he has longed to
reach an age of shiny automobiles, waffle-houses, open roads,
situation-comedies and large-scale baseball games. America is the one great
distraction from the rain'.
At
JFK airport, Theo ran into trouble when he refused to remove his top hat at the
customs office. They wanted to be sure
he was not smuggling in any weapons of mass destruction up there but he refused
to comply, claiming that if he removed it the energy of his thoughts would
dissipate into the atmosphere and his spirit would become muddled. Passport control confronted him and tried to push
his hat off, but it was stuck to his chin with a very tight strap (the winds in
Cambridge often
made it tilt, calling for ever increasing degrees of rigour). Convinced of its
danger, security guards and a bomb squad assembled around Theo. Once more they
demanded he remove the item and he got a bit narky and said he hasn't flown
three thousand miles to be interrogated like a criminal, at which point two cops
jumped and wrestled him to the floor. His portmanteau went flying and all his
papers fluttered into the air.
'You
imbeciles!' he shouted. 'You can't even spell colour and now you have the gall
to arrest me?'. Fearing that his odd and vintage syntax was a terrorist
activation code, they zapped him with a stun gun and he was out cold. They
placed him on a stretcher and send him to security headquarters where, after a
short examination, he was handcuffed and put in a convict bus headed for Guantanamo Bay.
It was not the welcome he expected and when he came to an hour later he
was doozily confused and not sure about anything. His feet were locked to rails along the side,
his passport missing and his hat irreparably tarnished. There was one other
convict in the bus - a shifty looking young fellow with an anarchic,
subterranean haircut.