“I must be back in America. It’s difficult to keep track sometimes, and to occupy myself I try to count the number of time zones I’ve crossed. What time is it where I’ve come from? What time is it at home? And where is home anymore?”
The flight is delayed. None of us knows for how long, and only a few of us can recall with any certainty how long we’ve been waiting. The terminal is beginning to feel like home. Every few minutes I nod off and jerk back awake, trying to remember which airport this is. The girls next to me are chatting away in Polish. The man opposite holds a paper whose headline reads: “OSAMA BIN LADEN IST TOT.” The language on the televisions is English, though, and so too are the signs and logos lining the concourse stores, a microcosmic suburb.
I must be back in America. It’s difficult to keep track sometimes, and to occupy myself I try to count the number of time zones I’ve crossed. What time is it where I’ve come from? What time is it at home? And where is home anymore?
I check my phone. “WELCOME TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!” it tells me, and I find the greeting strangely reassuring. The time is 9:35, though my body disagrees. I figure I’ve been awake for close to thirty hours now, and my circadian rhythm has slowed to a funeral march. I know I should eat something, but I’m too afraid of missing the boarding call to wander away from the gate.
The weather outside is stormy, but not so bleak that I can’t make out the surrounding runways and fields and trees. I’m too exhausted to remember if this is O’Hare or Hartsfield, and anyway what difference does it make. This view is common to every airport in the world, as if by passing security and customs one passes outside of time and space into a dimension where nothing moves or changes. If I remain here in this terminal I might never age.
I’m at once imprisoned here and freer than I’ve been anywhere else. Each gate has a door with a digital sign next to it. Gate 34, Antwerp. Gate 35, Amsterdam. Gate 36, London. The entire world is quite literally within walking distance. Anyplace else, this might seem like a cheap joke, like those novelty roadsigns you seen in empty places – a crossroads in Alaska, say, that gives you the direction and distance toward Moscow, Beijing, Paris, and New York City all at once.
The current of travelers surging down the concourse does little more to help calibrate my internal compass. This more resembles an old-world multinational bazaar than any other place I’ve ever seen. Even the familiar is slightly askew – a group of young musicians with Midwestern accents are talking about a concert in Ankara. They bang their instrument cases together in jet-lagged confusion, and that word, Ankara, jars like an unexpected chord in a familiar sonata.
This temporal and geographic dislocation feels like the worst kind of religious revelation, Julian of Norwich recorded by Franz Kafka. I want to talk to the woman next to me, but I don’t know which language to use. Later, when another woman asks me, in English, which language I speak, I stare dumbly before deciding that English is a reasonable reply. She only wants to know if the jacket left on an adjacent seat is mine. It isn’t, and at any rate I’m already wearing a jacket. Her accent is Russian, and I try to explain the jacket situation in Russian, but there’s nothing to explain and anyway I have hardly any idea what I’m saying.
After a few hours, the conversations at the gate start to lose sense and coherence. We’re all starting to feel isolated by all this openness, somehow. We aren’t ourselves anymore. Soon I’m telling a middle-aged Iowa insurance agent things I haven’t even told my closest friends.
Later I see a man my age rushing down the corridor with a skateboard under his arm. He looks like someone I used to know, and I forget my fear of missing the flight and chase after him. I lose him in a crowd of Korean businessmen, and when I find my phone and dial his number I get no answer. I sleepwalk back to the gate, realizing when I get there that I’ve apparently bought a cheeseburger from one of the fast-food kiosks.
Sighing, I calculate the odds of my friend being at this airport, wherever it is, and wonder what he’s doing here, whether he’s coming or going. The question doesn’t seem to matter: right now, we’re both nowhere. Gathering myself again, I notice that my phone is no longer welcoming me anywhere. Welcome to Nowhere.
Long ago I had a long-distance lover whom I visited from time to time. I have trouble recalling her face now, her voice, but her memory shimmers to life whenever I find myself in places like these, half-awake, breathing in that clinical scent unique to airports. I feel dislocated, and for a moment I wonder if I’m here waiting to visit her. No. I haven’t seen her in years, and I don’t even know which country she’s living in these days. Time is moving in all directions at once.
Prior to the last several decades, no human being in history has ever experienced this sense of waking coma, this sense of being just cognizant enough to realize that you don’t exist in the real world anymore. We aren’t wired for it: this is a truly modern malaise.
My body can’t remember how to function, so it stops functioning. Instead I pretend to read, and it takes all my effort. When another traveler asks me where I’ve come from, I hardly understand her. Finally I manage to tell her Frankfurt, but she’s never heard of the place. We stare strangely at each other, our mouths neither fully closed nor fully open, and soon we return to our feigned distractions. But I know she’s thinking the same thing I am. Does anyone know we’re gone?
Someone else is telling me about his trip to Slovakia. I try to listen – really, I do – but the words lose their meaning the second they hit the air.
I’ve had nothing to drink in ten or twelve hours and my throat feels like crocodile skin. All of a sudden I want to strangle the bald guy talking about his Slovakian dessert liqueurs. Maybe it’s his feigned explorer bravado – I can tell he’s picturing himself with a Prussian mustache and pith helmet – and after so many airports and airplanes I’m tired of these affectations. So I just nod and smile and laugh where appropriate.
Still, I understand him well enough. There’s a slight current of fear in his words, the same fear that he can see in my eyes, in my patient smile.
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