The sourest air of the skies leaks through the terminal gates, pulses through the concourses, drifts into the ticket lounges. It smells like a headache: you can’t believe you don’t have one. You know you will soon, any second now. But is it only jet exhaust that hangs in the air? Can the bad smell be us, our oils and secretions having seeped over years into the naugahyde seating, the accumulated filth of human traffic permeating this enclosure along with the reeking chemicals used to clean up after us? Kenneled, we stampede from gate to gate, urgent to be released, perhaps contributing faint, rancid fumes of our own.
***
On the way home from a conference in Texas, I feel the stare of someone in the waiting area. She is tall and dark, attractive. She catches me staring back at her; I see her looking just as she snatches her gaze away from me. This is repeated for a few moments until she walks up to me and asks if I am David Birnbaum’s sister. Astounded, I answer yes. She tells me her name and explains that I look just like my brother whom she knew years ago, in the late sixties. David was her friend’s boyfriend for a summer, one summer in upstate New York. What is there to say to each other once this is confirmed? I tell her some news of him, of the family. We find we are, after all, leaving the same conference, but that doesn’t take us anywhere. No, you aren’t likely to meet someone in an airport and have it develop into anything. It’s like finding an old fragment of bone in a riverbed. Even if you pick it up excitedly, to consider its possibilities, you want to find a reason to leave it.
***
The crowd is muffled, nearly silent. Mechanical voices speak about doors not springing back or flights about to depart or bags that will be impounded if left unattended. I try to figure out if the voice is real, which I believe it sometimes is. I think about the sense in which it could be mechanical: whether the voice is only reflecting a mechanical task or, in fact, a mechanical personality, or if it actually emanates from a machine. Beeping carts remind me that in airports I wish to be old or lame so I don’t have to haul bags down endless corridors. I look at the passing riders with envy: the weak have inherited the airport.
***
I listen to three female employees of the airport bar planning a dressy night out, at a hotel bar. It isn’t even noon and they are talking outfits--tight little black skirts, borrowed silk tops--planning every move, debating the time they should show up, outlining the phases of the evening. It’s their turn: for hours they have looked after the smokers and drinkers of the world who are secluded here. They’ll be young and beautiful (in other uniforms) when they enter the hotel bar, at just the right moment: 9:45. We’re at the end of their shift, the beginning of my trip--late, promising morning.
***
How free I feel going away! Once I have left the house, locking the door on the worries inside, I am giddy without my burdens. I remember those troubles after an hour, but I look at them as though through layers of distance, great long spans of time. I remember the people I knew an hour ago, and I experience nostalgia for that life. In the airport my existence is calculated in minutes and hours, ever renewable. This life is completely new. It’s marked by passages through gates, past wings, into seats that move. Nothing is fixed except the building, which surges with expectant people. Planes--of experience--intersect here; if you could cut the airport open you’d find a disorienting cross-section of lives, cords dangling, going nowhere.
***
The airport becomes a transition, a piece of progress that connects places, allows the moves we make to flow together like paragraphs in a story. It’s a sign of motion, the evidence of transit in memory. We feel we are moving, so we imagine we are changing. We encounter our young selves again as we set out. We recognize the distinct, immediate expectations of something new about to happen--we used to feel that way about everything. We’re excited, until we find ourselves in, say, the Green Bay airport again with gray hair this time, still stuck with ourselves and our lives pretty much as they have been for years. Where are we really going? What kind of process is it that churns us through the airport?
***
In Atlanta, I run into people I haven’t seen for years, people not from Atlanta, as I am not. They are friends of my family I came to know after my parents were divorced and my father lived in Sri Lanka. They stop and we try to talk in the busy concourse. They seem concerned, interested in how I’m doing, how my father’s doing. I remember a day on the beach when this woman massaged the small of my back to relieve my menstrual cramps. Her touch had seemed so warm, assumptive: a mother’s touch. I’m amazed that they remember me and that we happened to meet here. For a moment, I want to know why. I move on, searching the faces for familiarity, as I always do in foreign crowds, expecting to recognize someone in the next glance. Sometimes I have the feeling that I know all of them, or at least I’ve seen them, only I can’t remember where.
***
We are becoming intolerant of appearing in public. As housewives have always known, now on Prozac and a generation ago on “mother’s little helpers,” social skills atrophy and exposure to people becomes stressful, absurdly charged and exhausting. We don’t want that downside to our efficiency (home offices are the way of the future, all the techie pundits say so), so let’s agree to pretend we don’t see each other as we move through the airport, all of us in our curlers and flowered housedresses. Take care of yourself, don’t look at strangers, don’t talk to anyone unless you need something. A pleasant, smiling, public face need be worn only by those who are paid to be at the airport. Respect the wish of others not to be peered at or spoken to: use the whole place as you would a public rest room. Don’t embarrass people. They wish to watch their televisions, read their papers, write on their laptops, doze in their seats . . . alone, or with those they know. It’s too much thankless work to be a person out in the world.
***
Seated at the gate, pretending not to watch, I look for clues of relation to demarcate the rows, to distinguish whether the guy talking across from me is a nut or a creep, or married to the woman a seat away. Sometimes a cluster walks by, familial resemblance binding them. Mostly we’re mixed, we run together, our identities are lost here. (We don’t know if they’re taken from us or we give them up.) I don’t know who knows each other here, even sometimes when they’re saying good-bye. Once, I saw a man and woman part without speaking, without even looking at each other. I watched intently (I would have seen a mumble between them) as he stayed near her as she moved ahead in the line, at last walking mechanically away without looking back at her, who didn’t look back at him.
***
Ibelong here: this place has been constructed for me. I am doing the right thing here, spending money, going somewhere, believing in technology. I am not alone, but I can feel independent here, as I have chosen my route among the thousands available. A trace of adventure remains for me, in spite of the schedules and the many others going where I am going. I am on the move, taking to the skies, getting where I’m going as fast as possible. As long as I purchase a ticket, I am welcomed, offered a sense of belonging and comfort here. What’s more, that belonging is temporary and anonymous: perfect.
***
These days, you wear what’s enough. If you’re flying to a conference and running directly there, you suit up. If you’re meeting a lover for a holiday, you wear your favorite new jeans, perhaps tighter than you’d want to wear for a long flight under other circumstances. If you’re not going anywhere where it matters what you look like upon arrival, you wear the hideous Velcro sandals and the assorted exercise wear or pajama separates that you would like to think double as street clothes. People used to dress for travel, as my family did when I was small. My sisters and I wore our finest frilly dresses, even for trips that stretched into a second full day, to destinations like Taipei, Taiwan and all the way back to Washington. The youngest of us were bedwetters, and seatwetters when we traveled. I wonder about the alternate wardrobes, and if my mother carried other starched dresses. We did not question our delight in making a nice impression on the world.
***
Air travel used to make you really something. If you’d flown to Paris, France, why you were “broadened.” Now nearly everyone has flown to lots of places, and it’s clear it doesn’t often improve a person. Or at least, on a large scale, it doesn’t appear to advance the species. And being subjected to so much inconvenience and discomfort during transport, we are probably learning to hate rather than love one another’s cultures. Strange currency, languages, customs--think of how stressful, I mean broadening, the experience of a foreign airport can be. And we’re so tired, we are dehydrated, our necks are sore, we have been given such small portions of the tasteless food. It was worth it when no one else had done this who would know how wretchedly ordinary and humiliating the suffering can be. All that’s left is to make it routine, so we are here to compete with the traveling salesperson flying first class who acts as if it’s not worth mentioning, as if the difference is only time and money between one place and another.
***
I’d brought my Salvation Army coat with me when I visited my father in tropical Sri Lanka, knowing that I’d return to cold weather in Pittsburgh. It was a beautifully funky, drapey coat from the forties in the only color I wore, gray. A narrow line of black velvet around the collar made the coat my favorite of several I’d collected for less than a dollar. I was saying good-bye to Daddy at the airport now, since my college graduation gift of a visit had run out after eight months. I was to go back to the States and get a job. I was full of dread, but making the most of the last few moments to be the baby of the family, taunting Daddy like a ten-year-old. Suddenly a smirk appeared on his face and I knew he had me on something, as always happened. He pointed to the seat behind me, where I had laid my coat. A mass of flies careened and swooped above it, an embarrassingly visible melee. The months of heat had ripened the old woolen coat, which I had not thought to dry clean. People around, dressed elegantly in silk saris, looked on.
***
Looking at people as they walk by, you begin to imagine you understand something about humanity. You see character in carriage. The swagger in this one makes you loathe him; the mincing, hurried step of that one fills you with contempt. The alikeness of people in a crowd makes points of difference seem clear. There are so many with similar shoes that a strikingly stylish pair draws you up short. You look quickly at her face--is she interesting? intelligent? beautiful? You fall in love immediately, with her and her lover--so elegant, solemn, young--bearing themselves with such mild coolness. You want to tell them they affect you this way, but of course your staring is bad enough. They look back at you, invaded, investigative.
***
Most people are caught in the moment, in the exertion of hauling, in the hunt for the gate. They are unselfconsciously alert to “getting there.” They are not playing to anyone; they’ve cast their ways away. They are really who they are now--their natures show. What intimacy! We can’t deny it, even if we don’t want intimacy with strangers. If we do, the opportunities are everywhere to enter open doorways. We look to see who is looking, in that way. We wonder at ourselves, out in public practically naked, as in a dream. The atmosphere is sensuous, brazen; the eye contact is sumptuous.
***
In Santa Fe, I pass a clock with no hands. No planes come in; no sound is heard. There isn’t a newsstand. Nothing to buy. In the spare waiting room, two or three people sit on stylish wooden couches. How is this place related to O’Hare or Heathrow? Only in the drained, slack look of faces leaving or left, faces no longer animated by love or necessity. Waiting there, I remember a time at our own airport in Tampa, crowded with stranded, crumpled travelers. A little girl walked by, her hand in her mother’s, as Don and I sat against our bags on the floor. With a voice full of concern, she called out to us, “Where’s your Mommy?”
***
Always the place is dreary, wearing out visibly. Stains and chips and tears work their steady ways. The lighting tends to be patchy, either too bright or dim. The music is saddening; its thin veneer of cheer worsens the sinking effect upon the heart. The pervasive imperfection that will never change, even if it is made new or attended to regularly, is similarly disheartening. In the midst of this, people take on its meager, disintegratinglook: our appearances seem to whine, “This is the best I can do!”
***
What’s difficult is examining yourself, which comes from thinking you’re being examined. You don’t want to be watched as you’re watching most of the time. You wonder if everyone is only pretending to be in a very important private space. Have they not lost hope of becoming something in the eyes of a stranger. . . but are afraid to see absence reflected there if they make eye contact? You are no one when you see that you are not seen; you have vanished, leaving no trace. If you turn yourself on like a TV and no one watches you, after you have committed to being present, this is a bad surprise. We want to be like TV’s with fine planned programming for viewers. We’d also very much like to avoid appearing when we are not prepared to be seen, when we are in public, and this is becoming possible. But not everyone understands the “off” signal yet, and so there are these awkward moments when people examine you and you have to think about what they see.
***
Japan Airlines certificate dated Aug. 25, 1960: my one whole bone not left in the riverbed . . .
Proclamation of the Seven Deities
of Good Fortune
KNOW YE BY THESE PRESENTS
that, having entered the ethereal realm of the Sun, the Sky and the Moon,
while spanning the Pacific on the wings of the Courier,
Miss Lisa C. Birnbaum
has crossed the International Dateline, and thus has jumbled Yesterday, Today,
and Tomorrow from their mundane, time-worn order.
***
The longing to be lost to the world a little while, when you’re merely on the way to Pittsburgh, can overtake you. Perhaps you won’t return from Pittsburgh the same, or very different, but you’ll have been suspended out of context, without your usual meanings, your home outside your self, your evident history of transit. You may find that mystery seeps in--a sweeter air leaks through the gates!--as you wait to enter not merely a plane, all of a sudden, but the sky.
Published by Grand Tour