NOTE: This is part of a continuing online novel. Here is the Table of Contents.

The America Diaspora is a sequel to The Chinese Century.

This was not the country I remembered.

It was obvious as I cleared customs at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta.

“Freedom,” said the inspector, giving me some caricature of the U.S. military salute.

I nodded, I was tired. He kept the hand up. “At ease,” I finally said, wearily.

“Please step aside,” the inspector responded, dropping the arm and the smile he’d had for me moments earlier.

Fifteen minutes later, my bags a mess, my electric toothbrush confiscated and my Palm erased, I was finally let-go, reluctantly, into a late Atlanta evening.

The MARTA train had raised its prices, I noticed. A ride now cost $3, up from $1.75 a few months earlier. I grabbed a newspaper sitting on the seat. Apparently the increase had just gone-in, the result of a government decision eliminating all subsidies for mass transit, and a state decision to follow suit. “Atlanta On Its Own,” the headline screamed. Well, cried really.

The train was dirtier than I remembered, so too the stations. Yellow-vested MARTA cops patrolled both, but it seemed there were more homeless to patrol as well. Twice on the way north, and once on the way east, sad-eyed black men or women (it was hard to tell which some were) opened the car doors, belting out a tale of woe and begging for hand-outs. One dragged a small child with them. The reaction was much colder than I remembered before, too. None got a dime off the whole car.

I dragged myself toward the house we’d lived in for 21 years now. I felt my bladder contract, the way it always does for me when approaching home, like a dog knowing the door is about to open. It all looked the same, and for this I was very thankful.

I used the key in both locks and stepped inside. Everyone had gone to sleep. There was school tomorrow, I remembered, and Jenni would have to get up before 6 o’clock to get the kids started on their routine. I placed my bags on the dining room table, quietly, and went to obey my bladder’s command.

She startled me. Jenni was wearing the oversized tie-dyed t-shirt she usually wore to bed, her long hair, still dark, all around her, thick glasses and (best of all) her welcoming smile. We kissed, like we hadn’t in years. We’d never been apart this long, not in nearly three decades together. We were missed.

The next morning I drove both kids to school, and returned to find her at her computer. She’d called in “sick,” but was still trying to get a few hours of work in. That’s the way she is. Other women may get their self-respect from their looks, their families, even the way they cook. Jenni’s comes from being dependable, from getting the work done, from knowing she is good at what she does, and valued for it, at being a part of the team. I like to think that’s what I first saw in her, but I’d be lying. It’s what I found when I got past that. But it is what I fell in love with.

So I went to the kitchen and quietly prepared some breakfast. She’d started buying sliced bread from the market – I’d preferred making my own in the KitchenAid – but I found some eggs, processed cheese slices, some butter, and began preparing our favorite, eggs-inside-toast, sometimes called Toad in the Hole. Cut through the bread with a glass, heat a frying pan, place one piece inside, drop in a pat of butter, wait for it to foam and crackle, then crack an egg in there, let it fry then flip it, place the cheese on top and wait for the egg to come off the pan easily. I pulled out a Dr Pepper, made a pot of tea for myself, and served.

Spring had come, and some of it was already going. The little violet grass flowers I remembered from so many years here were already gone, and the dogwood flowers were fading. You could see the oak pollen flying, and the cars had taken on a dull yellowish-green tint. Atlanta’s annual floral orgy was in full swing.

I took a deep breath, sneezed, then smiled. I told Jenni about my strange welcome from the customs agent.

“Just say ‘freedom’ back,” she said.

“Why?”

“It’s what’s done. It came in with loyalty oath. At work we call it the Bush EULA.” She pronounced it like you-lah. It took me a few moments to understand what she meant. End User License Agreement. It’s what you click “yes” to when you load new software. No one reads it, but we’re all bound by it.

“You act like it’s no big deal,” I said.

“It’s not. I don’t know why you think it is.”

We were getting off on the wrong foot. I changed the subject to school. Robin had passed all her state graduation exams, a year early. John had brought home new story sheets, but there were so many she had finally asked they be e-mailed to her.

“Story sheets?” I asked.

“It’s a new program. Everyone’s taking it. Required by the federal Department of Education. Just some stories he has to read for school, then take a test on. Robin has them, too, but I finally put my foot down on her dyslexia and she has until the end of next year to get them done.”

“What kind of story sheets?” I asked.

“It’s a values curriculum,” she said. “Some are taken from that William Bennett’s Book of Virtues, or his Moral Compass. The stories for those under 12 are taken from his Childrens’ Book. And there are a few new ones, about loyalty to the state, about identifying enemies, just-written. Orders of Secretary Spellings, part of No Child Left Behind.

“It’s no big deal.”

I shrugged, and didn’t argue. “Can I take a look?”

She turned back to her computer. “I’ll give it to you.” She pulled out a key-sized storage device, plugged it into the USB port of her machine, and a few moments later I plugged the same device into my own PC, copied the files over and handed her back the key. The wonders of modern technology.

The longer I read the stories, the more my hackles rose. Some stories were relatively innocuous, messages against illegal drugs and extramarital sex. Others were less subtle, the enemies being Hollywood movies, Muslims, long-haired professors and, most frightening, journalists out to uncover government secrets. All were portrayed as enemies who must be resisted, denounced, and thrown-off. Real America was surrounded by enemies, the stories screamed, and you have to fight them every day, in every way.

Since going to South Africa I hadn’t kept up with my old e-mail buddies. I’d closed my newsletter, stopped my tech blog, lost contact with many friends from the Dean campaign. Fortunately my copy of Outlook Express still had the old addresses. I checked the Web, found some sites closed (out of money, I figured) and checked for messages from greaterdemocracy, the group of aging liberals I’d loved hanging out with the year before.

At least here was an argument.

The house, as often, was divided. Some, like Jenni, considered the new restrictions no big deal. One pointed out that the Pledge of Allegiance had previously been amended, in the mid-1950s, with the words “Under God” inserted, so there was no big deal with adding “to the President” (I hadn’t heard of that), and it might stimulate loyalty in the future to an elected Democrat.

Others were more concerned, or was paranoid the word? One noted how the villain of one new story seemed a lot like Howard Dean, while another seemed like a young Bill Clinton. “Are they going to rename the Boy Scouts the Bush Youth and make all the kids join?” asked another.

Fair questions, I thought, or maybe I was getting paranoid, too. I had believed I was keeping up with American events while in South Africa, but I now realized I’d had no idea what was going on. All these loyalty tests masked a grim economic reality. The only things holding up the dollar were the promises of a balanced budget, and reduced imports. Military costs were actually rising, when the new money for Iraq was taken into account, which meant that whole programs I had grown up with were being zeroed-out. Not just aid to mass transit, but federal aid to schools, and to hospitals, and to the poor, it wasn’t just being reduced but eliminated.

And the taxes! A rate is a rate, the President said. That meant no more home mortgage deduction, no more deductions for health care, all those middle-class entitlements wiped away at a stroke. No wonder he had to guarantee loyalty. I’d do the same thing.

Just because it was politically logical didn’t make it right. Bush was using hate as fuel to get the country through a depression. My friends and I were his Jews. It’s not your fault, or our fault, that your taxes are skyrocketing, that your kids’ horizons are narrowing, that you might be losing your job, or at least working a lot harder for less money. It’s those secularists, those liberals, they did it, not us.

Anyone who compared Bush to Hitler was probably subject to arrest by now, but that didn’t make us liars.

I was glad to be getting out of it.

But could I persuade my family to join me?

Jenni and I left the kids at home that night and went to the restaurant around the corner. When I’d left a few months before tables had been impossible to come by. Now the place was half-empty, and the help was very glad to see us. They fussed over us so much Jenni was embarrassed.

We laughed again, shared a drink, shared each others’ dishes, became a couple again. Then I laid it out. If we sold the house and moved our assets into Virgin Maverick we could do very well, I said, very well indeed.

“No,” she said.

No?

No. Certainly I remembered my convincing her to get her 401k out of her own company’s stock, she said. She’d stuck it in mutual funds, and while we felt safer, her employer’s value was up 40% since then, the stock market as a whole was down. Now I wanted to go the other way? What right did Virgin-Maverick have to demand this? What’s the difference between them and what you say of Bush?

Well, so far I’ve actually doubled what I had in my old IRA, I said. South Africa is growing. Look around, this town isn’t. Do you really want to go down with it?

“And what am I going to do in South Africa,” she said. “Here there’s important work and I like the people. Who wants a 48 year old programmer who doesn’t know C in South Africa? You want me to move 10,000 miles away from my family, away from everyone and everything I love, and there’s no guarantee it will be any better there.

“No. That’s it, no. No way.”

We continued to eat in silence. She didn’t like my moping, felt it was just another form of pressure.

“But I am going back,” I replied finally. “It’s not just the growth and the work and the story.” I told her about Mma Ramosawa, about Always-On Technologies, about my picture in the foyer with the word “founder” underneath it. “For the first time in my working life someone really believes in me, and in my vision. I have a purpose there. All I am here is an unemployed freelance, a mediocre blogger, a tech journalist without a beat, a nobody. In JoBurg, I’m somebody. And you can be somebody too.”

“I am somebody. I’m somebody happy. I love my home, my kids are growing, my job is fulfilling, we have more than enough to live on. I can stay on for another decade, then we can retire. And then I’ll travel with you wherever you want to go, so long as I can take books with me.”

That’s not good enough, I said sadly. I need to see what I can do in the world. I need this chance. Even if it means separating again, maybe for longer.

We were quiet for a long time. The last few months had been hard on both of us. Were we really splitting up over work?

We compromised. I’d go back, for a time, she’d see how things were in Atlanta. We’d make our decision later. Procrastination may not be a strategy, but sometimes it’s the only solution there is.

When we got home, I rushed to my PC, checked my e-mail, and composed some blog entries from it. My life wasn’t here anymore. The broadband link wasn’t tight enough for me to reach my new life.

I realized, all at once, that I missed my home. My new home. And for the first time in my life, it seemed, home wasn’t where my heart was. When I finally turned off the PC, some hours later, I silently prayed that in time my heart would follow.

Please, God, I prayed, bring Jenni back to me. Amen.