Ethereal - Page 2

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 if 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.