That was the one thing about Peter. If something made him uneasy, he’d dodge around it. And he was good at that. Probably didn’t even know that he was dodging. It was just how he instinctively made his way in the world. He wasn’t an Artful Dodger. More of an Artless Dodger, guileless and unaware. As a young child Zula had seen some of that behavior in Eritrea, where confronting your problems head-on wasn’t always the smartest way; the patriarch of her refugee group had devised a strategy for getting even with the Ethiopians that revolved around walking barefoot across the desert to Sudan, checking into a refugee camp long enough to make his way to America, starting a life there, getting rich (at least by Horn of Africa standards), and sending money back to Eritrea to fund the ongoing war effort.
But the Forthrasts came out of a different tradition where, no matter what the problem, there was a logical and level-headed behavior for dealing with it. Ask your minister. Ask your scoutmaster. Ask your guidance counselor.
Peter had been really troubled on the drive down the lake shore to Elphinstone, then hugely relieved when they had opted for the western route. By going west, he had effected some sort of dodge.
To avoid some scary-looking, switchbacky stuff in the Okanagans—perhaps not the best choice, in the middle of the night, and at this time of year—they shot up north and connected with a bigger, straighter highway at Kelowna. There they stopped at a gas station/convenience store, and Peter took the exceptional step of buying coffee. Zula made the hopeless suggestion that she be allowed to drive and Peter offered her an alternative role: “Talk to me and keep me awake.” Which she could only laugh at since he hadn’t said a word. But from Kelowna onward she did try to talk to him. They ended up talking mostly about nerd stuff, since that was the only area where, once he got going, the words would really tumble out of him for hours. He was perpetually interested in the underlying security apparatus of T’Rain and how it might be vulnerable and how, therefore, he might be able to improve it, while charging them money for the service and making him look very good to his new employer. Zula was perpetually unable to talk about it much because she had signed an NDA of awesome length and intimidating detail, something on which no minister, scoutmaster, or guidance counselor could ever have given sage advice. She could talk about what had been made public, which was that her boss, Pluto, was the Keeper of the Key, the sole person on earth who knew a certain encryption key that was changed every month and that was used to digitally sign all the fantasy-geological output of his world-generating algorithm. It was sort of like the signature of the Treasurer of the United States that was printed on every dollar bill to certify that it was genuine. Because the output of Pluto’s code dictated, among other things, how much gold was in each wheelbarrow of ore dug out by Dwinn miners. Zula had not been hired to work so much on the precious-metals part of the system—her job was computational fluid dynamics simulations of magma flow—but she had to touch those security measures every day, and Peter was forever posing hypothetical questions about them and how they might be breached—not by him but by hypothetical black-hat hackers that he could be paid to outwit.
That got them awake and alive to Abbotsford, still something like an hour outside of Vancouver, but grazing the U.S. border, and in some ways a more logical place to cross. They stopped, not for gas, but because Peter’s bladder was full, and the stop turned into a long one as Peter used his PDA to check the waiting times at various border crossings. Meanwhile Zula went in and bought junk food. When she came out, he had the back of the vehicle open and was fussing with something back there. She heard zippers, the rustle of plastic. “You want to drive?” he asked her.
“I’ve been telling you for six hours that I’d be happy to drive,” she pointed out mildly.
“Just thought you might have changed your mind or something, but I would really like to rest my eyes and might even go to sleep,” he said, which Zula did not intuitively believe since to her he seemed to have a pretty serious buzz on. But something clicked in her head to the effect that he was dodging again. The act of driving across the border was triggering his dodging instinct. It had happened as they had neared the fork in the road at Elphinstone and was now happening again. She agreed to drive.
“It’s the Peace Arch,” he said. “We want the Peace Arch crossing.”
“There’s one, like, two miles from where we are now.”
“Peace Arch has less traffic.”
“Whatever then.”
So she began driving them the last few dozen kilometers west, to the Peace Arch crossing, which was actually right on salt water: the farthest they could go, the longest they could delay the crossing. Peter, after a few minutes, leaned his seat back and closed his eyes and stopped moving. Though Zula had slept with him more than a few times and knew that this was not his pattern when it came to sleeping.
The electronic signs on the highway said that the so-called Truck Crossing—just a few miles to the east of the Peace Arch crossing—was actually less crowded and so she went that way. Only two cars were ahead of them in the inspection lane, which probably meant a wait of less than a minute.
“Peter?”
“Yeah?”
“Got your passport?”
“Yeah, it’s in my pocket. Hey. Where are we?”
“The border.”
“This is the Truck Crossing.”
“Yes. Less wait time here.”
“I was kind of thinking Peace Arch.”
“Why does it matter?” Only one car to go. “Why don’t you get out your passport?”
“Here. You can give it to the guard.” Peter handed his passport to Zula, then settled back into a position of repose. “Tell him I’m asleep, okay?”
“You’re not asleep.”
“I just think that we’re less likely to get a hassle if they think I’m asleep.”
“What hassle? When is there ever a hassle at this border? It’s like driving between North and South Dakota.”
“Work with me.”
“Then close your eyes and stop moving,” she said, “and he can see for himself that you’re asleep, or pretending to be. But if I state the obvious—‘he’s sleeping’—it’s just going to seem weird. Why does it matter?”
Peter pretended to sleep and did not respond.
The car ahead of them moved on into the United States, and the green light came on to signal them forward. Zula pulled up.
“How many in the car?” asked the guard. “Citizenship?” He shone the flashlight on Peter. “Your friend’s going to have to wake up.”
“Two of us. U.S.”