The woman behind the desk sympathized, but wouldn’t give it to us without an “event ID number.”
“Hmm, all right, that’s fine… but do you have the actual license with you, mate?” she said. She smiled warmly; she wanted to help.
The answer, however, was no.
My driver’s license was some 3,900 air miles away in Singapore, stuffed into a desk drawer, stacked with a MTA MetroCard, Oyster card, Big C member card, and other cards occasionally used. I’ve needed my license twice since moving to Singapore two odd years ago — once to rent a car in Detroit, the other to get one in London — so I spaced on bringing it to Sydney, where my wife and I had long planned on a day trip to Hunter Valley wine country, located about two hours outside the city.
I realized I’d forgotten it a few days prior — my wife doesn’t carry her license, either — so I had a friend who was catsitting snap photos of the front and back of my license and email them to me, in the hope that I could print those photos, and that that would be sufficient.
(My friend had no problem finding the license, as I’d described in great detail where to find it and how to identify it: “It’s in my office, in the drawer underneath where my computer is sitting,” I wrote. “When you open the drawer, you’ll see a stack of cards on the left side; rifle through those, and you’ll see a sketchy picture of me looking like a coked-out motherfucker. That’s my license.”
When he emailed the photos, he wrote, “Bro, this is the funniest thing ever. When you said ‘coked-out motherfucker’, I didn’t think you were actually going to look like a coked-out motherfucker, but it turns out you do. Brilliant, and attached.” For the record, I wasn’t coked-out when the picture was taken; my expression was merely reflective of what it feels like to visit the New York City DMV office to get your lost driver’s license replaced. It makes you look and feel coked out.)
The prints weren’t sufficient.
“Yeah, unfortunately you need to have the actual license,” said the sympathetic woman behind the desk. “This actually came up just last week, when we had a woman in here who’d lost her license. She called the police and reported it lost, then they gave her an event ID number that she could use in case she got pulled over or had to produce her license. Have you lost your license, or…?”
“Well, uh… maybe.”
She was sympathetic, and apparently willing to play along. I mean, I had proof of a valid license, even if I didn’t actually have it.
“Okay, well, if it’s lost you can try calling the local police to file a report. If they give you an event ID number, you can come back with that, and I can release the car. Okay? I’m not sure if they’ll do that, but it’s worth a try. I’ll hold the reservation for you.”
I stepped outside to call the police and report that my driver’s license was missing. About halfway through my good-intentioned white lie, my wife ran out of the carpark office located next to the rental car office, eyes wide, gesturing, saying something about terrorists. I waved her off, because white-lying to the police takes concentration and it seemed to be going well thus far.
“Okay, Brian, that’s fine,” said the policewoman, who’d spoken with me patiently, kindly, and with sincerity, despite what felt like a silly thing with which to bother the police, white lie or truth. “We’ll contact you if anybody turns it in, and just give us a call back if it turns up, okay? Let me give you the case number so you have it.”
Bingo.
I strode into the carpark office to give my wife the good news, but there was bad news. She and five parking attendants stared at a small, boxy television set. There was a situation at a CBD cafe, not far from us. A gunman had taken hostages, it seemed, and there was an ISIS flag in the window. Here, now, were hostages, pressing hands against the glass, facing the street, as if they were about to be frisked.
It was about 10:15 a.m.
Forty-five minutes earlier, my wife and I had walked within a block or two of Lindt cafe, a random coffee-chocolate shop in Sydney’s CBD. Thirty-five minutes earlier was right around the time that Man Haron Monis walked into the cafe, carrying a bag in which he’d placed a sawn-off shotgun, a shotgun later used to execute one of his hostages, cafe manager Tori Johnson, with a single shot to the head. He may have also used it to kill another hostage, Katrina Dawson, though as I write this the cause of her death has not yet been determined.
Forty-five minutes earlier, we’d thought about stopping somewhere to grab a coffee for the walk over to the rental car office, but didn’t. We did watch three policeman zip by us on motorcyles, sirens blaring. We’d thought nothing of it; perhaps there was a fire or a car accident or a brown-bellied snake attack. Later, we learned that they were the first responders on the scene.
I had the event ID number, but for a moment we weren’t sure that we should be on the roads. Nothing was clear at that time; one of the carpark employees told us that a few months ago a beheading at Martin Place, where the cafe was located, had been threatened. God help us, maybe this was it; an ISIS flag, after all, was apparently hung in the window. Maybe this was just a distraction, and other, larger events were in the works; someone had already been arrested in Sydney that very morning, after all, on terrorism suspicions.
It was a beautiful morning, clear skies and warm, and I couldn’t help but remember that 9/11 happened on a day just like it. Nothing was clear.
But I had the event ID number; I’d gotten it by calling the police, unknowingly, as the same time all of this was unfolding. This was the only chance we’d have on this visit to go on our long-planned day trip to Hunter Valley, so we did what most would probably do: we traded the event ID number for a rental car and took the trip.
In the car we listened to talking heads talk about the situation as it unfolded, our emotions vacillating between excitement (guilt) about seeing Hunter Valley and incredulity at what had happened, at what was happening as we bombed down M1. We talked about those poor, poor people stuck inside that cafe, and we talked about which vineyards we wanted to visit.
And that night back at our Airbnb aparment, after we’d visited several vineyards, after we’d splurged a little on a fancy lunch at a fancy vineyard restaurant, after we’d been thrilled at spotting a pair of kangaroos in the wild, we sat down to watch the news, waiting for something to happen. A few hostages had escaped, but there were more still inside. Oh, and the Taliban slaughtered more than 100 kids in a Pakistan school, too.
We passed out.
In the morning, I awoke to news that the gunman and two hostages were dead. The school children in Pakistan were dead, and oh, a gunman was on the loose in Pennsylvania, too. He’d killed a bunch of people. We showered and dressed, and did what most might do: returned the rental car on time, then walked to a nearby art museum and had coffee.
