Stuck in My Evil Twin's Shadow

(By Peter O. Zierlein For The Washington Post)

I'd like to meet this John Kelly fellow. He obviously leads a much more interesting life than I do.

Whatever he does got me pulled out of the international arrivals line at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport on Thursday night and sent to a little room not far from the luggage carousels.

I was a bit frazzled. A week driving on the left side of the road, followed by five hours sitting in Heathrow after our first plane developed electrical problems, followed by seven butt-numbing hours on an airliner, followed by the sight of three of my fellow passengers vomiting in the customs line at BWI, not far from the "Bird Flu" poster, will do that to you.

And yet I was strangely energized when the immigration officer scanned my passport into his machine, then sat up straight, as if jolted to attention. His fingers raced over his keyboard, then he leaned back, tapping my passport against the counter as he focused on the computer screen.

"Wait here a minute," he finally said, getting up and consulting with another officer.

I'd been wondering whether something like this would happen. A couple of years ago, I was held up in passport control after a vacation in Europe. The problem: John Kelly had done something to get his name -- my name, our name -- on a list. It obviously wasn't the do-not-fly list -- I had flown -- but it was the sort of list that would mean all the luggage carts would be gone by the time I went in search of one.

"Can you follow me, please?" the officer asked, ushering me, My Lovely Wife and our two daughters into a waiting room.

A pipe somewhere had leaked, and a trash can had been put out under a brown stain on the ceiling to catch the dripping water. Four people were already waiting. The young immigration officer behind the counter called up an elderly African man and woman and asked them to sign their names on forms he produced, as a man I took to be their son helped explain what was going on. Then the officer inked their forefingers and rolled them across the papers. With that somber ritual finished, he welcomed them to the United States.

He had more pointed questions for the other gentleman, a well-dressed man from Nigeria. Why, the officer wondered, had the man not set foot in the United States for the past six months, even though he had received a permanent resident card? And why was he staying just a week in this country before returning to Nigeria?

"A permanent resident card isn't like E-ZPass," the officer said. In other words: What part of "permanent" and "resident" don't you understand?

The man thanked the officer for the information and then was dismissed with the observation that if he didn't start living in this country soon, he might find himself never living in it.

Then it was my turn. When you know you're not guilty of something, it's kind of fun to sit back and see what happens. Would I be asked probing questions? Would I get the good immigration officer/bad immigration officer treatment?