Bro Code

“Ladies and gentlemen, we will soon begin our descent into San Francisco International Airport--”

I jolt awake after ten hours of no rest. My wife is shaking my arm. 

“Wake up!” Her voice buzzes a few decibels below the airline announcement and above the whirring engines. “We’re landing.”

“I know!” I grouse; my old bones groan as I shift in my seat. “I’m not deaf!”

She ignores me, folding the indigo blanket of polyester on her lap, her face a perennial scowl. The back of her seat bounces up with a thud. “And straight up your chair!” she adds. 

A quiet sigh flees my throat while I did as bid. My head shakes at such a low frequency that could be easily mistaken for a result of the currents. 

The altitude continues to drop. 

Pinching my nose as I blow, I release pressure through the ears like steam engines and entertain the thought of what if. What if I had too much earwax, or someone has tried to kill me and sealed my ears, causing my head to explode? Would my brain and veins splash on my wife like John’s on Jacqueline? I stifle a chuckle.

The landing has been smooth – or, hell, I wouldn’t be able to jot down all this – not so much with getting out, though. As if my seat cramped in the middle isn’t bad enough, my middle seat is also in the very back of the plane. Rolling my shoulders while rubbing my sore neck, I wait. We wait. We wait to bring up the rear for a good grief of thirty minutes after parking at the gate.

Until the scorching sun of California in early June beats down through the glass of the jet bridge, the real nightmare began.

Customs.

The U. S. citizens are let in at the speed of a gurgling stream while the rest of us layer in lines like scum amassing a stagnant pond. Heads and shoulders of men and women and whatever they would like to call themselves these days bobble before me. I exhale a silent cry of despair.

Another hour and a half after the eleven hours in the air.

Wife barely speaks a word to me, nor I to her. After twenty-six years of being together, and eleven hours cramped side by side in the same confined space, even the incandescent lamps on the dull ceiling of SFO customs seem more interesting than her sallow face, and I won’t find it presumptuous at all if the aversion is mutual. Marriage palls. Period.

“Next!” A man’s voice rises from window number twelve.

Slinging wife’s Coach gym bag on my shoulder, I trot after her with the rest of our carry-ons.

The officer sitting behind the window is an obese man about my age with a balding pate and about a week’s worth of stubble. He wears a blue shirt with the top button unfastened and a pair of brimless glasses on the hump of a bulbous nose. Two remarkable smile lines etch down his blotchy cheeks while his thin lips part and close, “Passports, please.”

We comply.

“What’s the purpose of your visit?” he asks.

“We’re attending our daughter’s graduation. She’s graduating from Berkely,” wife replies in a strong Chinese accent brimming with pride. Not that I have anything to rail about, I mean her accent. I barely speak English. I can read and write in it; I can understand what's spoken to me. I just avoid speaking it at all costs, aware of my accent. On that front, wife is more of a man.

“Are you visiting your daughter?”

Wife nods, as do I.

“Can I see the copy of her passport and documents regarding her legal stay in the U. S.?”

Wife prods me in the chest with an outstretch of her elbow.

I fumble inside the bum bag.

“Not in the bum bag!” She shoots daggers at me.

“But that’s where I keep the valuables!” I retort. “Passports, bank cards, phones, and cash!”

“They only need to see the copy! Copy, remember?” she cranes forward her head, both her hands facing up, her ebony eyes glaring. “Copies are not important but take up quite a space. So, I've asked you to put them away in a folder in the zipper pocket!”

I cock a brow as the memory comes back to me, seeping through the interior of my skull like mold. We squabbled over where to put the copy of the ceremony invitation, daughter’s passport, visa page, student’s ID, unofficial transcripts, and her birth certificate to prove she is ours – all the papers that are larger than life even in copy. To terminate the squabble, however, I did what she asked without agreeing like a real, married man.

Wife stoops over the suitcase.

“There!” She straightens, then flicks at me another hard stare before swiveling back to the officer.

He takes the folder from her, his eyes roaming between wife and me, his lips primmed.

“How long do you plan to stay in the U. S.?” he asks once he is done with all our documents, his pudgy fingers pounding on an aged, black keyboard before him.

“Two weeks,” wife answers. “Daughter has arranged a trip for us.”

“Wonderful,” the officer remarks halfheartedly, his eyes on the computer. “What do you do for a living back in China?”

“I teach at college. My husband is a doctor.”

He takes his eyes off the computer, his mouth the shape of an “O”, his brows a quizzical arch. His eyes return to the screen.

“Alright, you’re both set,” he says, stamping our passports. “By the way, Dr. Zhang, how long have you been married?” He hands back our passports, his eyes boring into mine.

“Twenty-six years,” I slur.

“To the same woman?”

“The same woman.” 

And there, something happens I have not expected. For a moment, he and I synchronize, taking a deep inhale with wide eyes. And…exhale. In the moment, we establish a bond regardless of all our physical, mental, racial, cultural, and perhaps political differences. The bond of being a middle-aged man no one cares to listen to, of being taken for granted, of sticking to a marriage that doesn’t work so as not to fail our responsibilities as a father, of working sixty if not more hours a week for our entire adult life so we can afford to send our kids to places like Berkeley, where they take bullshit class like Social Justice Education and learn to call their old men neo-Nazi just because we refuse to acknowledge their nonsense! I’ve almost worked myself to a heart attack to foot the bill of fifty thousand dollars a year for four years to be Neo-Nazi? What the fuck is that? Where is my justice?

Aw well, like I’ve said, no one cares. To the rest of the world, middle-aged men with our last century masculinity are just so toxic for wanting to provide. And who would have thought, what transcends me and this American dad from our national feud isn’t love or humanity but our toxicity!

For a moment, I see the possibility of an impossible friendship with this guy I just met, and the moment lasts for the length of a breath.

“Well, enjoy your trip, and congratulations to you and your daughter,” he says, smiling with flat lips.

I return the same smile, a smile only men of my age understand.

We go through the customs and pass a hallway leading to the escalator that takes us downstairs to the baggage claim.

“What the hell was that?” wife sputtered, looking at me over the shoulder.

“What do you mean?”

“That immigration officer gave you a wry smile after you said you’ve been married to me for twenty-six years!”

“What smile?” I stand my ground. “There is no smile!”

“Yes, there is!” she insists. “And you smiled back!”

“So what? It has nothing to do with you!”

“First you denied there was a smile, and then, you said it had nothing to do with me! So, which is it? If you want to lie in my face, at least put in some effort!”

I rub my brow and sigh. Wife and I haven’t slept in the same room since day one daughter went to Berkeley. She does her things, and I do mine. We’ve managed not to collide so long as we don’t stay under the same roof for longer than an hour.

“It, it’s,” I stutter and concede as I always do. Why am I always the one who concedes? “It’s some kind of bro code, alright?”

“What bro?” wife scoffs before stepping off the escalator. “You don’t even know the man!”

“Then why should you even care?”

“Because some stranger has just mocked our marriage, and you agreed with him!”

“Now, that’s quite a slippery slope!” I halt my feet, my arms throwing in the air. How strange is it that intuition, often in the disguise of fallacy, can reveal more truth than logic? Or to put it another way, why should the truth of our marriage being a joke, a sacrifice, a fatuous shackle disguise as a fallacy? Have we deliberately rendered the truth unbelievable so we don't have to stomach it, that our marriage has sucked the life out of both of us and too late to rectify?

Since it has taken us too long to get out, our luggage has already been removed from the carousel when we arrive. We put our bickering on hiatus and rifle the claim area for our suitcases. Then, when we finally see our daughter at the arrival hall, we put on a smile and hug her in turn.

On the ride to her campus, I glance out at the sun-besotted American west passing through the car window. I close my eyes.

How do we all manage to live under the same sky? How so many people of so great a difference come together for a common purpose that builds society, and when the purpose is gone or becomes impossible, all we have left are our unbridgeable differences. The story of Babble comes to mind. God should never have sabotaged our pursuit of heaven by giving us different languages. We’re just too different already.