The woman shuffled us into a dark, grim room with only one working light at the far end and shut the door, returning to her magazines. There was a non-European woman in there sobbing already. Later she would manage to communicate in just enough French I could understand that she came all the way from Mauritius, but for time being, the Dutch/Australian woman and I spoke enough English to make each other’s acquaintance. She was coming to London for an unpaid internship for school. Her Border Patrol officer, a bright young man with a hopeful disposition, was in communication with her professor.

There wasn’t much to do in the room. Every so often the woman at the desk would ask briskly if we were hungry. I declined, unable to eat anything. The promised “art supplies” turned out to be a disorganized pile of children’s coloring pencils that had never been sharpened and were mostly unusable. There was no paper, but there were some small post-its. After a long time, the Australian/Dutch woman and I began a game using the last few colored pencil nubbins and post-its: she would write a saying in Dutch and I would illustrate its meaning. We posted them on the back of the bench we sat at, under the only working light, in a circle of gloom. I tried to use the pay phone in the room, but it required payment in a form I didn’t carry. All the phone numbers I needed were on my phone anyway.

“I don’t understand why they are doing this to us,” my cell mate repeated, “We aren’t criminals!”

I looked over at the darker woman from Mauritius crying in the corner, and I thought perhaps the Dutch/Australian really meant, “we don’t look like criminals.” I hadn’t seen another white-skinned person in the holding area or the Corral of Shame. I wondered. We were both women. Neither of us had the backing of a Big Employer to come running for us. Where were the chatty American businessmen I stood next to in line at immigration? Perhaps they had companies like IBM and Microsoft backing them, legitimizing their travel and threatening big trouble for anyone interfering. Two women, a student and a self-employed web developer… Who would step up for us? A professor? A conference organizer? These thoughts raced through my mind as time wore on and I grew more and more tired. The adrenaline kept me awake. It was 8:25am.

I had been 22 hours without sleep.

My eye was twitching uncontrollably when my officer showed up for our “interview.” It didn’t feel like an interview. He was curt and seemed upset about something. If I had had some sleep, I may have thought to ask for a different officer to perform the interview, one who seemed less distressed. Instead, I tried to please him.

He took me to a closet of a room with a bright, working light, and a thin layer of dust and grease on the small table between us. He set to work with clenched fist, furiously writing down our conversation, word for word. From the interview room next door, I could hear the woman from Mauritius shouting “my father, my father!” in French into a speaker phone.

The officer asked if I was “willing and happy to take the interview.” I had trouble responding. He tersely repeated the question, visibly annoyed at my confusion. I tried to explain I’d been 22 hours without sleep and was worried it might affect my ability to answer coherently.

This did not feel like a friendly chat. I wanted my wits about me.

He smirked and said if I didn’t feel up for it then, he could come back later… The implication being he could leave me to tough it out in that dark, dirty room sans sleep for a few more hours without contact with the outside world.

It was the back of this form that I wish had been read to me.

I agreed to continue the interview, although after I got home I would learn that I had the option to request time to rest in a hotel. Also, there was a phone number for legal counsel that he omitted when reviewing documents with me. I surely would have used it.

I began to feel like a mouse being played with by a cat who became increasingly annoyed that I wasn’t running or scampering for its pleasure. My mind was fogged with sleep deprivation, and I just wanted to tell him what he wanted. But somehow that wasn’t enough. He tried to play games to prove something, but I didn’t seem to play along the way he hoped.

He had opened by asking who had paid for my flight. I replied truthfully that I had, thinking he, like the woman officer I had met on my first visit to the UK, was concerned about the providence of my ticket. Later he attempted to “catch me lying” by asking if I was getting reimbursed. I replied truthfully I was.

“Ah ha! So why did you tell me you had paid for your flight?”

Because it was on my credit card.

He asked why I hadn’t said anything about it because I was “so chatty now.”

I told him point blank: there is nothing I can tell you to make you happy. I have to be very careful what information I volunteer, because if I talk too much, you get angry. And now if I don’t talk enough, you get angry.

I asked, “What can I do to make you happy? You’re inconsolable.”

He didn’t write much of that conversation down. I think his hand was getting tired.

Yes, I feel I could tell you anything.

He was also concerned that the company paying me was German. “Don’t you find it odd, a German company, taking British pounds, quoting you British pounds?” I didn’t see the problem. The company was paying VAT and were wiring me USD after the conference. The only reason we were using pounds in correspondence was so officials like him could make out the sums. Maybe Euros would have been more clear?

If you need legal advice, there are helplines?

He told me that the honorarium and letter of invitation only applies if the company inviting you to the UK is based in the United Kingdom. This clarification was not on the gov.uk site I and the organizers pored over. As an event in the UK, organized by UK citizens, it didn’t occur to me that a German company paying a speaker an honorarium to make that possible would be an issue, especially when the size of the sum was not that large.

Perhaps that realization stung the most. Here I was, having the worst time of my life, and it wasn’t even for an amount of money that made my life worth living. No one would come for me. No paycheck would be waiting for me when I got home in spite of it all. All that time spent preparing, creating, honing a talk for an audience that would never see it. Was I really out here, on my own, risking a helluva lot just to share? With a nation whose border patrol is looking for any excuse to put me through the ringer? I thought, what the hell am I doing with my life?

“We will have to send you back because of this.”

Now that I knew the verdict, I immediately sought an amenable solution: was there any kind of visa I could get, currently or in the future, that would let me do what I came to do?

“No.”

How about if I agreed to do it for free? I was already there. I was taking a huge loss regardless. His mood lifted ever so slightly and he left to speak with his manager for some time. When he came back he told me she had given him the order to deport me within 24 hours. I could get on the last flight back to the USA they could fit me on, or I could stay overnight at the detention center. For once, he made a helpful recommendation: to not stay at the detention center.

The flight back was to New York City — not my home of Portland on the opposite coast of the USA.

“Oh. Well, we only have to drop you off at your nation’s nearest port of call.”

A woman of less means might have found having to make a last minute cross-country flight and/or stay in one of the most expensive cities in the world bankrupting, but the organizers honorably offered to pay for it.

The interview was deemed over. I remember emerging from the Interrogation Closet, turning to the Dutch/Australian woman, and bursting into tears, “They’re sending me back.”

Looking back, I don’t even understand why this caused me so much sorrow. My diary entries from my first visit to the UK indicated I had early on resigned myself to whatever fate had in store for me as soon as I had entered the Corral of Shame. So why was I floored by this? All I can think is that the lack of sleep and the stressful treatment I received had broken me in a way I hope to never be broken again.