May 29.
I sleep on the ship one more night. At 6AM, the hollow smash of freight containers wakes me up. They’ve started to offload the cargo. After breakfast, they offload me, too. Everyone’s hard at work— First Mate Christoph, Chief Engineer Werner, Paul the Steward— so there are no goodbyes. I guess that’s how it is on a freight ship. Sailors don’t get sentimental when it’s time to say goodbye to the cargo.
Passenger Sue and Passenger Mark call a cab and they invite me to share the ride. The cab driver is a tough Flemish guy with apple cheeks and tattoos that cover his arms like bruises. Not hipster tattoos, but sailor tatts. Maybe the guy was in the navy. Maybe he was a pirate. I don’t ask.
We judder over the cobblestones on our way to the passport office. It’s a strange sensation after all those days at sea. Solid ground. A surface that doesn’t bend or yield the way the ocean does, but that fights back with a million little hooks and jabs.
The passport office is an empty room painted two ugly shades of green, as if the interior decorator couldn’t decide which shade was uglier, so they went with both. At the far end of the room is a square of bulletproof glass with an immigration cop sitting behind it. I guess this place with its puke green walls and its flickery fluorescent lights is as good as any for a national border. You can conjure up a border anywhere, really. Put a grumpy guy in a uniform, hand him a passport stamp, and presto: the border between everyplace that isn’t Belgium and every place that is.
After we get stamped and processed, I say goodbye to Sue and Mark. Then all the sudden, I find myself on my bike on a street I don’t know the name of, a whole Atlantic Ocean away from where I started from.