Things were looking up.
* * *
The plane touched down with a thump hard enough to set us all rocking for a moment, stirring the infant next to me back into fussy wakefulness. I smiled encouragingly at her mother, offering a little wiggle of my fingers as distraction. The mother radiated relief. Apparently, flying with an infant was a horror—I could have guessed that—and people were frequently resistant to the idea of flying next to one—I had observed that. Being moved up from coach to first class and seated next to someone who didn’t mind babies had been like winning the lottery on multiple axes at once.
I like babies. They’re simple. Their thoughts are simple, their needs and desires are simple, and if I need something soothing, I can watch their synapses making lasting connections, a process most adults have long since finished. Plus, babies have such basic inner lives that I don’t really feel like I’m eavesdropping when I listen in on them. This baby had such a limited set of experiences that she didn’t yet know her name, or have preferred pronouns, or really understand that her toes were always there, even when she was wearing shoes. She was like a tiny, occasionally smelly meditation trigger.
“It was nice to meet you,” said Christina. “Is someone picking you up from the airport?”
She wasn’t angling for a ride, I realized; she was preparing to offer me one. Oh, that wasn’t good. If we got into a private car, after the amount of time we’d spent together, I’d be a member of her family before we could get on the freeway. She was too nice to spend the rest of her life feeling wistfully like she’d somehow misplaced her favorite sister.
“I’m good,” I said. “This was sort of a spontaneous trip, and I have family here. I’ll be fine. But thank you for asking.”
Both statements were true, even if neither of them answered her question. I was planning to head down to the taxi stand and invite myself along on a ride that was heading toward the family compound. It would be safer, since whoever actually paid for the cab wouldn’t have been sitting next to me for the last several hours.
“No problem at all,” said Christina. Susie fussed. Christina turned her attention to the baby.
That was my cue. Fishing my phone out of my jeans pocket, I turned it back on, and winced as it began buzzing frantically in my hand. Almost thirty text messages had come through while it was shut down for the flight, which seemed a tiny bit excessive.
The first ten were from Mom, wanting to let me know that she was thinking about me, she was worrying about me, she was pretty sure I was on the plane by now, but if I wasn’t, I could come home and she wouldn’t be angry, it was okay if I needed more time. The next five were also from Mom, and were a little closer to flipping out—in one of them, she suggested I make it a round trip, get off the plane in Portland, and get immediately back onto a flight heading for Cleveland. Ugh. No thank you. I’d had my fill of being crammed into a flying metal tube of human minds and human fears, and I wanted to rest.
After that came a series of texts from Dad, detailing the steps he was taking to try and calm Mom down, and reminding me how important it was that I text her as soon as we landed if I didn’t want her to come to Oregon and shake me vigorously back and forth. I smiled at that, and switched back to Mom’s messages, intending to do as he’d suggested. It was better not to put this off.
Then my phone buzzed again, and I nearly dropped it. Artie. I had a text from Artie.
Trying to be nonchalant, I finished my text to Mom—“Safe on the ground. Made it to Portland. No headache. Think I’m okay.”—before taking a deep breath and opening my latest message.
Just had weirdest feeling, it read. Like you were almost in the room. Miss you.
For the second time in under a minute, I nearly dropped my phone.
Wow, I replied. Weird. Where r u?
Text grammar makes my teeth ache a little. When I was in school, part of my job was learning to blend into the human population. Don’t stand out, don’t make waves, don’t attract attention. Do what everybody else does, because the wisdom of the herd is the best possible camouflage. That’s spilled over into my adult life, meaning, among other things, that I have to text like I don’t care if anyone’s judging my spelling.
I care. I care a lot. But we do what we have to do to survive in this world.
Home, Artie replied. Face-chat tonight? We can watch a movie.
Can’t. Will explain soon. I added several emoji—two snakes, a smiling girl, a rainbow, a bee—and shoved the phone back into my pocket before I could see any reply. I wasn’t there yet. I needed to make it all the way to a safe house if I wanted to pass the test Mom had set for me.
The plane finished taxiing to the gate, and the flight attendants turned off the fasten seatbelt sign. I bounced out of my seat, sliding past Christina and the once-again sleeping Susie, and grabbed my backpack out of the overhead compartment, slipping my arms through the straps before the cabin door was even open. It unsealed with a hiss and I was out, not running, but walking very quickly away from the rest of the passengers.
I knew too much about them. I didn’t know what they looked like, and it didn’t matter, because I knew what they thought like. I knew who was cruel and who was kind and who probably needed to be hit with a baseball bat for the things they believed were okay to do to their fellow humans. I was just glad the entire plane had been human. Being stuck with too many kinds of minds would have been even worse.
I strode my way along the jet bridge to the terminal, sucking in great breaths of fresh airport air, which might be processed, but hadn’t been circulated through the cabin for the last several hours. I wanted a bathroom and a salad and a ride home. I wanted—
I stepped into the terminal and stopped dead in my tracks, suddenly feeling like I’d been punched in the gut. People streamed out behind me, shooting sour thoughts about people who stopped in walkways in my direction. I didn’t move. I was struggling to breathe. The thoughts stopped, replaced by weary irritation at the need to step around some inanimate but unavoidable obstacle. I was cloaking myself. I wasn’t trying to, but I was, and I couldn’t stop, because I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move.
The static roar was drowning out everything else, filling my mind from end to end, so that even the thoughts of the people behind me were muffled, becoming little more than background noise. They were inconsequential in the face of something so much bigger.
There was another cuckoo in the airport.
Three
“Anyone who tells you that you only die once hasn’t actually died. They wouldn’t be so cavalier about it if they had.”
—Mary Dunlavy
Portland International Airport, trying really hard not to panic