Page 2 of The Dream Hotel

T he trouble started in Terminal B, on the last Friday before Christmas. Because of a power outage earlier that morning, the Customs and Immigration hall was packed with travelers—retirees in matching baseball hats, sullen teenagers in checkered pajama pants, toddlers trailing behind disheveled parents. Stepping off the moving walkway, Sara noticed a sign that advertised concierge exit for a hefty fee, but having already spent more than she should have on her trip she resigned herself to wait. The line for passport control snaked around the hall all the way to the back wall. This might take a while, she texted her husband.

“No phones allowed,” an officer barked, pointing at an orange-colored notice that banned the use of devices. “Turn off your phone.”

“I’m sorry, Officer,” she said, putting her phone in the back pocket of her jeans. “It’s just my husband. He can’t find parking.”

The officer seemed unconvinced. Sara felt his gaze on her for a long time, even as more stations opened and the line began to move at a steady pace. On the loudspeaker a male voice warned, first in English and then in Spanish, to maintain visual contact with your property at all times. Somewhere, a child wailed inconsolably. When Sara’s turn came, she picked up her bag and shuffled toward Scout, which directed her to put her hand on his fingerprint reader, speak her name into his microphone, and look into his tiny green eyes. The cameras made her feel self-conscious; she wasn’t wearing any makeup and her hair was a tangled mass of curls. “Report to Line B,” Scout said.

Well, that was strange.

She took a step back and presented herself to the AI a second time, but Scout refused to process her. “Report to Line B,” he repeated in his metallic voice.

As she joined the new line, Sara looked around her at the other travelers who had been selected for human inspection: a scruffy couple in backpacking gear, a woman carrying a sleeping infant, a handful of elderly people. On rare occasions, the AI still returned more than one face, which meant that an officer had to verify the correct match. Perhaps Sara’s unruly hair this morning had caused a snag. Mercifully, the new line was short. In her pocket her phone buzzed again, but she resisted the impulse to answer it. With holiday traffic, it would take Elias and the twins a while to circle the terminal again and return to the pickup area. By then, she would be done. She handed her passport to the CBP officer, a middle-aged woman with a lineless face and thin eyebrows filled unevenly with pencil.

“Sara Tilila Hussein,” the officer said, drawing out every syllable. “Did I pronounce that right?”

“Uh. Yes.”

“Where are you coming from today, Ms. Hussein?”

“London.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Attending a conference.”

“And what is it that you do?”

“I’m an archivist. I work for the Getty Museum.”

“Up on the hill? That’s nice. I like the gardens there.” The officer scanned the picture page of the passport, then looked at her screen, toggling from tab to tab. At the next station, an elderly couple presented their documents, got their stamps, and walked off to Baggage Claim. A few feet away, an airport employee pushed a woman in a wheelchair through the security gate.

“Is there a problem, Officer?” Sara asked, trying to keep impatience out of her tone.

“No,” the officer said, though she kept the passport, holding it open with one hand while she used her mouse with the other. She seemed riveted by the information on her computer screen, which Sara found strange. For the past six or seven years, she had traveled to London for the same conference, flying the same airline, and landing in and out of the same airport, yet she’d never had to go through an additional passport check. It didn’t seem that facial recognition was the issue. Was it because she had broken the rules when she used her cell phone? She put her bag down and rubbed the soreness from her hand. Standing under the white lights of the customs hall had made her warm, and she removed her jacket and scarf and stuffed them inside her bag. After a moment, the officer stood, raising herself on her toes as she looked beyond her glass-walled cubicle to the other stations. “Hernandez,” she called.

Damn it. Sara shifted on her feet. This new delay meant that Elias would have to circle the terminal a third or a fourth time, with their thirteen-month-old twins strapped in their car seats. They would have woken up from their morning naps by now and would be screaming for the bottles that were tucked in the mini-cooler in the back, out of his reach. The phone in Sara’s pocket buzzed once again, but she didn’t answer it. She could imagine his frustration mounting as she ignored his calls and texts. He had spent the past five days taking care of the kids; she knew he was desperate for her to come home.

Officer Hernandez came inside the cubicle and stood behind his co-worker, whose name tag, Sara noticed now, said Hastings. “So check this out,” Hastings said. Together, they stared at the computer screen. “It looks like a 55-60, right?” she asked, looking up at him for confirmation.

“Let me see.” Hernandez took the mouse and started clicking and scrolling, moving at the same glacial pace as Hastings. Meanwhile, the people waiting in line stared and whispered amongst themselves. Sara felt as though she were being watched by a disapproving audience and, her performance having failed to impress, the heckling from the peanut gallery would start in short order. “Yes, 55-60,” Hernandez said after a while. “That’s correct.”

With this verdict, both officers turned to look at Sara. At once she became anxious, even though she had done nothing wrong. Hastings said, “Ms. Hussein, you have to go to Inspection and Prevention. The elevator is down the hall to your right.”

“What’s going on?”

“It’s procedure.”

“What procedure?”

“Your risk score is too high.”

“What? Why?” The last time Sara had seen her risk report was when she and Elias had bought their apartment, three years earlier. The bank had required a copy of the document before approving them for a fifty-year mortgage in their family-friendly neighborhood. She was marked Clear then. They both were. There had to be a mistake somewhere. But why did it have to happen at the airport, when she was already so pressed for time?

“The RAA officer will explain it you. Do you have any luggage to pick up?”

“No, I only have this carry-on.”

“Great. Officer Hernandez will escort you.”

“What about my passport?”

“Officer Hernandez will take it for you. Follow him.”

Not a secondary inspection, Sara thought, after all these years.

—

While the other travelers stood staring, Officer Hernandez stepped out of the cubicle with Sara’s passport and asked her to follow him. He took her on the elevator to the second floor, then through a maze of gray corridors to an office marked Risk Assessment Administration . Two armed guards sat on either side of the door, scrolling on their phones, eyes glazed. Inside the office, a glass wall separated a waiting area from an interview room, where a young officer was talking to a redhead in a velour tracksuit. Hernandez placed Sara’s passport in a sliding tray at the counter. “Have a seat,” he told her.

“How long will this take?”

“Not long. It’s just procedure.”

“You still haven’t told me what procedure it is,” she groused. But by then she was resigned to the bureaucratic delay and sat down on one of the vinyl chairs to call her husband. There was no cell signal, though, even after she turned off and restarted her phone. She assumed Elias had given up on curbside pickup and tried the parking structure again. With any luck he would have found a spot and would be wrestling the kids out of their car seats and into the side-by-side stroller, hard as it was to maneuver in the airport. Wistfully, Sara thought about the lunch they were planning to have at Mimi’s, a new restaurant that was supposed to have the best lomo saltado in town. She had made the reservation online the night before, a small gesture she hoped would make up for the inconvenience of picking her up at LAX on a holiday weekend. Now she wondered if they would be able to make it. Her phone said it was 11:45. Not impossible, she thought with deliberate optimism. If this interview took twenty or thirty minutes and Sepulveda wasn’t backed up, they could be there by 1:30. The twins would be tired, but she could distract them with games on their tablets.

Sara put her phone in her purse and waited. She wasn’t exactly a stranger to invasive searches at airports, from hand swabs for explosives at TSA checkpoints to detailed security interviews with hostile agents. When she was a child, her father made the family go to the airport three hours early every time they went on vacation, in order to allow enough time for the extra searches. He liked to plan for every eventuality, a habit that owed less to his training as a physicist than to the immigrant’s chronic fear of anyone in a government uniform. Sara’s mother resented this cautiousness—“why did we move here, then?” she’d complain—and regularly found ways to sabotage it. Sometimes, she would pack an innocuous item in three layers of tissue wrapping, forcing the agents to peel each one before discovering they were holding an old hairbrush or an eyeglass case. Other times, she would make a scene at the TSA checkpoint, loudly repeating each of the agent’s requests in her thick accent and offering unsolicited help. “You missed the zipper pocket inside, Officer,” she would say. “Let me show you where it is.” “What about my laundry bag? Don’t you want to search that?” Everyone would stare.

Mama was a character, Sara thought. A wonderful character.

Whatever Sara’s father did to anticipate and alleviate the hassle, however, it never worked. He was routinely issued boarding passes with the dreaded SSSS code or called to the gate to undergo humiliating screenings in full view of the other passengers. One time, when he dared to complain that a second search at the gate was unnecessary, the security agent took it out on Sara and her brother, Sa?d. They were eight and four at the time, dressed from head to toe in new hiking gear, excited to visit the Grand Canyon, where they were promised they could ride a mule. A big mule, with a saddle and everything. “Take off your shoes,” the agent ordered them. Her brother’s Tevas were green, she remembered, and hers were blue. Barefoot, they watched as the agent bent each shoe in half until it cracked. The Washi tape Sara used to put her shoes back together stuck to the arches of her feet, giving her painful blisters that lasted for days. The blisters were the only memory she had of the Grand Canyon.

Another time, when they were returning from their yearly trip to Morocco, they were held just long enough at Dulles International to miss their cross-country flight home, then released without explanation. The delay meant that her father couldn’t attend a ceremony at which he and three of his Caltech colleagues were to be honored for their work on a new generation of Mars rovers. What made these experiences difficult wasn’t that they never turned up anything and were a waste of time for all parties involved, but the gnawing feeling that her family’s ability to go about their business was entirely at the discretion of uniformed officers. Though she was only a child, Sara felt a visceral fear every time she was in an airport.

But once the government deployed Scout at security checkpoints, the hassle disappeared. Sara was a sophomore in high school by then, and she noticed the difference during her soccer team’s training trip to Mexico. All she had to do was present herself to Scout, and the AI instantly accessed her passenger identification, biometric information, and criminal records. The light turned green, and she was cleared through the checkpoint. No more long lines, no more questions. A new era of digital policing had begun, and young Sara Hussein, for one, welcomed it. It made transiting through airports fast and straightforward.

Until today, it seemed.

With nothing else to do, she watched the interview that was taking place on the other side of the soundproof glass. The young redhead spoke with so much raw emotion that her face turned pink. She pulled out a piece of paper from her purse and waved it rudely in the officer’s face. Yet he kept his cool. He examined the paper for a moment, asked her some more questions, then gave it back to her and stamped her passport. She came out of the interview room, dragging a set of matching leather suitcases and cursing him under her breath.

Then it was Sara’s turn. The officer retrieved her passport from the sliding tray and came to the door. This time, she took note of his name tag. Segura. Later it would occur to her that it was suited to his line of work. “Ms. Hussein?”

“That’s me,” she said, getting up.

“Please come in and have a seat.”

There was a large desk with two computer monitors, but no personal items of any kind—no framed photos or potted plants or funny gadgets. On one wall was a screen that played a silent ad for luxury vacations in Hawaii, a detail Sara found puzzling. On the other wall was a brass plaque with an official seal and a mission statement too small to decipher from where she sat.

Now that she was across from Officer Segura, she noticed that his uniform was of a different color than the CBP officers downstairs—dark blue, rather than black—and that he carried no weapon. The patch on his arm said RAA. Next to his computer was a small, motion-tracking camera that was aimed at her face.

“So you’re returning from London, correct?” Segura asked.

“That’s right.”

“And L.A. is home.”

“Yes.”

He asked for her address, occupation, and other personal information. Each answer she gave, he checked against the log on his computer. His thick, glossy hair was gelled into place and he had a tiny diamond earring in his right earlobe. Sara could easily imagine him out of uniform, in a hip jacket and jeans, sitting at a bar in Silver Lake. It made her feel more conscious of her present shabbiness. She was dressed for the cooler London weather, in jeans and an old flannel shirt with a button missing on the sleeve. Sweat stains were growing under her armpits. Fretting about the smell, she folded her arms.

“What happened on the London flight? It says here that the police were called.”

So this must be why she’d been pulled into secondary. “That was a medical emergency,” she explained. “Just before we pushed back from the gate at Heathrow, the old gentleman in the seat next to me started clutching his chest, like he was having trouble breathing. He was making this weird, throaty sound. I thought he was having a heart attack or something. So I buzzed the flight attendant, who got him help from a doctor a few rows down. The doctor said he should be taken off the flight before departure, but he refused. He really wanted to go to L.A., he said he was meeting his grandchildren for the first time. Anyway, there was an argument with the crew and in the end they called the police to remove him. The flight was delayed thirty minutes because of him.”

“That’s annoying,” Segura said.

It had been alarming, too. The old man’s face had turned brick-red, so much did he strain to breathe while also arguing with the flight crew. When the cabin chief told him he had to deboard, Sara could scarcely hide her relief. His situation might worsen when they were halfway across the Atlantic, and then what? But his rage at the order was immediate, and extraordinary. He turned on Sara for reporting his medical distress and by the time the Metro police took him away he was screaming at her about meddling in his private business. Had he accused her of something? Perhaps that was why the police encounter showed up on her risk report, even though it had nothing to do with her. All of a sudden she felt great bitterness toward the old man; she’d been trying to help him, and for her trouble he’d caused her to be pulled into an inspection.

“And who paid for your trip to London?”

“My employer. I was at a conference for work.”

“All right,” Segura said, dutifully typing her answer. Although he seemed to be in his late twenties, he had the posture of an aging office clerk, with a tight jaw and hunched shoulders. Ten more years of this, Sara thought, and he’ll end up with chronic back pain. He clicked to a new screen and, frowning now, he asked, “Can you verify your social media usernames for me?”

“My social media?” She paused, trying to figure out what connection there might be between the police encounter at Heathrow and her social feeds. There wasn’t any, as far as she knew. “Well, I have a Nabe account,” she said, “but I rarely use it anymore. It’s SaraTHussein, no hyphen or space.”

He nodded. “Anything else?”

“Printastic. It sounds like you already know. Can you tell me what this is about, exactly?”

“The algorithm flagged you as an imminent risk,” Segura said with great courtesy. His face betrayed no emotion; she couldn’t tell if he trusted the algorithm or was just following protocol.

“Me, an imminent risk?” Sara said with a nervous chuckle. But the fear and frustration that she once associated with airports wrapped around her, as familiar as an old, ill-fitting coat. On Nabe, she followed the pages of different museums, posted the occasional comment about that BBC costume drama everyone was talking about, and kept in touch with friends from high school and college. Earlier that year she had gotten into a heated argument with a computer programmer who had been one of her neighbors when she was at Berkeley. Darren often volunteered to DJ at the parties that were held in the courtyard of their dorm. At the time, he had seemed apolitical, never offering opinions about the TA unionization efforts Sara was involved in, or the calls on university leadership to divest from water stocks. In many ways, he was indistinguishable from other students in the building.

After returning home to Los Angeles, Sara had stayed in touch with everyone she knew at Berkeley through Nabe, which was how she’d discovered his conspiracy-laced posts and his fanatical devotion to firearms. When Sara commented on one of his tirades about the Chinese with a correction, he replied within seconds, starting an argument that lasted all night and covered everything from the Boxer Rebellion to Tiananmen Square. Sara found the exchange so tiresome that she vowed not to engage with him again, but it didn’t matter because Darren turned vengeful, reporting two of her archival photographs for nudity and causing her to be suspended from the site for three days. Once she regained control of her account, he reported her again, this time for spam because she had posted several links to a photography exhibit she’d helped curate in San Diego. She had to block him to stop the harassment.

But everyone had stories like this, didn’t they? It was impossible to be on social media these days without encountering trolls, bots, cyborgs, scammers, sock puppets, reply guys, or conspiracy theorists—people who were best avoided, ignored, or blocked. She wasn’t foolish enough to have posted threats or incitement against Darren, or anything remotely relevant to a law enforcement officer like Segura. Besides, Sara’s account was locked.

On Printastic her feed was public, but it was purely professional, devoted to archival images about her areas of scholarly interest. She was excited that the Getty had acquired an important collection of photographs from the Rif War, which she expected to digitize and catalogue. She posted a lot of open-source pictures of rebel fighters from the era, hoping to attract followers who would later be interested in the exhibit she would curate for the museum. Occasionally, she posted brief items about significant moments in early twentieth-century Arab and Amazigh history. These, too, would be of little appeal to anyone outside her field.

Segura looked at her levelly. “Yes, Ms. Hussein. An imminent risk of a crime.”

“Based on what?” she asked, her pulse quickening. She felt even warmer than she had downstairs and wished she could take off her flannel shirt. “Like I said, the thing at Heathrow was a medical emergency.”

“The software conducts a holistic review. It uses a lot of different sources.” A note of pride entered his voice, as if he’d had a hand in collecting the data himself.

Sara frowned. There had been no major change in her life since the last time she’d seen her risk report. She didn’t lose her job, didn’t get evicted, didn’t default on a loan, didn’t receive public assistance, didn’t owe child support, didn’t abuse drugs, didn’t suffer a mental health crisis, any of which might have ticked up her score. And she didn’t have a criminal record—wasn’t that the biggest factor in calculating the likelihood of a future crime? “But I’ve never been arrested,” she said.

“Right. I can see that,” he replied, his eyes darting back to his screen. He hummed as he weighed the information before him, then turned to her again. “Let me see your phone.”

Sara had read somewhere that CBP officers could legally search anyone’s phone at the border, but the idea of handing over something so personal still made her uncomfortable. Besides, Segura worked for a different agency altogether, which made her doubt whether the directive he gave her was legal. “Why do you need my phone?”

“I’m just trying to figure out why you were flagged, Miss.”

His tone made it clear that any hesitation on her part would only cause further delays. With a sigh, she unlocked her phone and handed it over. It was an older model, with a cracked screen she hadn’t had the chance to repair yet. Segura didn’t bother looking at her social media accounts, in spite of his earlier questions, but he took careful note of the apps she had—three newspaper subscriptions, a grocery delivery service, a baby monitor, a thermostat sensor, a word game, a sleep-aid tracker, and a dozen more she forgot she even had. Then he opened her photo library, and started scrolling. If he did this long enough, he would see the twins age backward from thirteen months, morphing slowly into the infants they used to be, so tiny and fragile that they had trouble latching when she nursed them. Scroll further down, and he would see her pregnant, her belly as big as a house, stretch marks spreading across it like vine tendrils. Scroll some more, and he’d find pictures of her in a bikini, on the last vacation she and Elias took as a couple. Scroll again—why was he still going through her photos?

She didn’t know what he was looking for and she was fairly sure he didn’t either, so the whole procedure left her feeling deeply violated, as if a stranger were standing at the window of her bedroom, looking in. It occurred to her that what Segura was checking wasn’t so much her phone, but her compliance with his directive to hand it over. Would he have counted it against her if she had said no?

“I’m a museum archivist,” she said after a moment. She wasn’t sure why she mentioned her job; it was an instinct, born of the belief that a museum archivist couldn’t possibly be considered a member of the lawbreaking classes. There had to be a mistake somewhere. After all, what use could she be to a criminal enterprise? Advise the higher-ups on best practices for organizing their records? The whole idea was absurd. “I’ve gone on this trip several times without problem,” she said. “What’s going on this time?”

“I’m not sure,” he said, handing back her phone and returning to his screen. It seemed he was genuinely puzzled by her presence in his office. He opened her passport and leafed through it. “Who sent you here?”

“Officer Hernandez brought me, I think you saw him? But the officer who referred me here was Hastings.”

“Oh, her.” He shook his head slowly, the way an old monk might at a zealous novice. Why was he being so candid about his disappointment? Sara felt as though she’d stumbled unaware into a tangle of office politics. The last thing she needed was to get ensnared. Segura leafed through the passport again. She had the feeling he was about to stamp it, because he reached for the desk drawer with his other hand. This was how it had been in the old days, too, when her parents were pulled aside for inspections: a few questions, a whole lot of hassle, and in the end they were let go. At the prospect of her release, her stomach let out a loud growl.

Segura laughed. “You hungry, huh?”

“Sorry. I haven’t had anything to eat since last night.”

Just then, another officer came in without knocking. “Yo, Segura. Wheeler wants you.”

“Now? I thought he wouldn’t decide until tomorrow.”

“Yeah, now. I’ll cover for you.”

“Can I go, then?” Sara asked.

But Segura was halfway out the door. “Just give me a sec,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”