MIND CONTROL
It was about 9 p.m., two hours after Dane Reynolds’ flight had landed at Lisbon Airport, when the immigration officials he’d been speaking with gave him the bad news: He was going to be detained for an indeterminate amount of time.
Reynolds had managed to misplace his passport between boarding his connecting flight from London and arriving at the Portuguese customs counter. Without that small, thoroughly stamped booklet, immigration wouldn’t let him into Portugal. For the same reason, he also couldn’t be sent back to London. The gears of immigration bureaucracy were at a standstill; therefore, so was Reynolds.
“Ummm…so where are we going?” Reynolds asked one of the men in a pressed navy-blue uniform. “Is there, like, a hotel or something here in the airport?”
The man burst into laughter. “Not exactly,” he said.
He led Reynolds through a series of sterile, halogen-lit hallways to a group of holding cells. They allowed him to call his wife, Courtney, to let her know what was happening. Then the officials took Reynolds’ backpack, phone, and shoelaces and put him in a cell.
Up until that point, Reynolds hadn’t been overly concerned about his predicament. He figured he’d either be released to the U.S. embassy in Lisbon or sent back to the United States, and either way it would be little more than an inconvenience. But the shoelace confiscation seemed ominous. Reynolds knew it was common practice for guards to take your shoelaces in jail so that you can’t try to hang yourself or strangle your cellmates, and he started wondering what the hell he’d gotten himself into. Should he be concerned with how tightly he could grip a bar of soap? Did he need to be initiated into an airport jail gang for protection? Would that require him to get some sort of facial tattoo, perhaps of the teardrop or spider-web variety?
Reynolds had a lot on his mind as he was led into the small cell, which quickly filled with roughly 30 other people despite the mere eight bunks lining the walls. But then again, he had a lot on his mind long before the immigration guards began unlacing his shoes. He’d recently opened up about his. He’d turned down a substantial head-to-toe sponsorship with footwear company Vans in favor of sinking much of his own savings into a clothing brand, called Former, which he and his friends were learning how to run on the fly. And he’d just found out that Courtney was pregnant again. With twins.
