Departure Lounge
Nowhere, notime, but they sure keep it clean.
My phone tells me it is 5:40 AM, but that’s on a different continent. There is a dull winter afternoon light streaming in through the windows, but I have to leave the concourse area to see it. My body is telling me that it’s no time at all. I could figure out how many hours it will be until I next sleep in a bed, but it would be a complicated computation of time zones and tickets.
The color-balanced fluorescents are more representative of how I actually feel: awake, awash in detail, but flat. Nondescript in my quick-dry synthetics on an industrial vinyl chair. Shabby in a formal, respectable sort of way.
I am surrounded by stores as I wait. Booze. CDs of pop music. A smallish bookstore. A seafood bar with deep orange crab legs and smoked salmon in glass cases, for the expense-account traveler. There’s a Harrods here too, because is London is somewhere nearby, after all. The compass clipped to my carry-on tells me I’m facing East but I certainly couldn’t point to where millions of people must be living.
The citizens of London, wherever they are, are not in limbo. They aren’t in a duty-free zone. They haven’t lined up carefully for the privilege of presenting their passports, haven’t been x-rayed, metal-detected, smelled and scrutinized for contraband gels and liquids. Me, I smuggled my toothpaste into carry-on. I feel proud of myself. Later, I’m going to brush my teeth in an over-bright beige restroom cleaned every hour by a teenage kid in a nondescript uniform. I wonder what his name is, and whether he has a girlfriend.
This concourse is inhabited sparsely by nondescript Europeans in slightly rumpled suits and jackets. Most of them speak English or at least familiar tongues. They are annoyingly acceptable, familiar, safe. I bet that frumpy businessman perusing the magazines is heading home this evening to his family in the suburbs of Munich. The banality of that offends me somehow. I wish instead that I was in some shithole of an airport in the third world. Maybe India. Maybe something like that ferry terminal in Penang, swarming with Indonesians waiting to cross the channel to Sumatra. There was life there, brown paper packages and noisy children and meals eaten hastily off of banana leaves. You might be able to make a friend there.
Here, I have no hope of a good conversation. Here, there is only air conditioning, which I am enjoying. The air conditioning will run twenty-four hours per day until the end of time. I can’t see the sun unless I walk out to a gate.
This is noplace. This is limbo. Time has no more meaning for me. I’m not even sure if I’m hungry or not. Purgatory is an international departure lounge, and I’m just another jetlagged soul. There has been a delay; there is no next flight ever. I am doomed to wander the concourse forever.
