Crossing the Line
This post is part of my Medium blog.
The main character of my first novel is a Canadian who works for an American company. That arrangement is quiet for long stretches of the book, and then it isn't, and I want to talk about why I built it that way.
The US-Canada border is, by world standards, a joke. I mean that as a compliment. It has been one of the easiest crossings on earth for as long as anyone alive can remember. Two countries that decided, mostly, to trust each other. There are programs you can pay into and apply for so you skip the line. NEXUS, Global Entry, Fast. The machines are faster every year. You'd think the whole thing had been optimized away.
It hasn't. It's still a border. And every time you hit it you feel that, in your stomach, before your brain even gets involved. It's a door between two legal systems. Things you can't bring across. Declarations you have to make. Someone in a uniform deciding, that day, that you look fine or that you don't. Cross it twice a month for work and you never fully stop thinking about it. It's an interruption that never gets fully absorbed into the commute.
Rob Coleman lives in Vancouver and works for a company whose center of gravity is in the States, so he's on a plane every few weeks. I set the books there partly because I've spent my whole life in the US and I've worked alongside the people who do this crossing constantly, and the thing that always got me is that the border never became wallpaper for them. First time is scary. Twentieth time is a chore. It's a chore that can end in a room, is the thing.
I have my own version, from the other side. Years ago I was living in Chicago and I had to drive to Canada for work. Why I was driving instead of flying is a story for another day, but the route put me at the crossing around two in the morning, alone, in the dark, with a booth lit up like the only awake thing in the universe. Are you coming up for work? The honest answer was yes. Then: what do you do? And I said the word consultant. I said, I'm a consultant.
That was exactly the wrong answer.
Consultant is the worst word you can say at a border, any border, and two in the morning is the worst time to say it. There's a whole apparatus behind that booth and its job is deciding whether your work could be done by a citizen of the country you're entering. I didn't know any of that at two in the morning. I just watched the officer's posture change and understood I'd said something wrong before I knew why. Everything eventually got sorted out. But I sat in that car with my heart going, completely certain that one wrong sentence was about to cost me something I couldn't name yet, and that's the feeling I was chasing when I wrote Rob.
I didn't put a border scene in Redundant. The book captures the tension sideways instead. Six in the morning in Vancouver is nine in New York, and the company operates on East Coast time, so Rob's whole city is asleep while his job is already yelling at him. Late in the book he ends up in a room in Manhattan with FBI agents who are coordinating with the Canadian government, and when that lands on him, all he can say is "I'm Canadian." Not an argument. Not a defense. Just the fact of his passport, offered up like that's supposed to explain something. It was already odd and somewhat annoying to have to cross the border back and forth for work, the book says. Now it was getting weirder.
Because here's the other thing the border is, and why I keep writing about it: a reminder that these are two different countries. That sounds dumb to say. But the two countries have spent decades drifting toward each other, culturally, so completely that you can forget the line is real. Same language, same coffee chains, same shows. Then something happens and you remember the line was there the whole time. Right now the American president is making decisions, about trade and about most other things too, that are pulling the countries apart on purpose, and everybody who lives on one side and works on the other is doing that stomach math again. Is my job still where I left it?
That's why the border stuff is in the books and not just near them. The trilogy is about what happens to ordinary obligations when systems start deciding things. A layoff wave. An acquisition. An AI strategy nobody can explain the origin of. All of that lands on people, and it lands differently depending on which side of a line you're standing on when it arrives. The people it lands worst on are the ones with a border between their job and their bed.
I keep thinking about the people doing that drive at two in the morning right now, answering the questions as best they can. Most of them get through. They always have. The border is easy, historically speaking. It's still a border.