“You don’t mind if I take this seat, do you?”
“No,” says Paula.
“Oh, good.” The tall man smiles, and he is blonde, and he is older. His suit screams of class; her clothes scream indifference. It’s only a sports bar at ten-thirteen at night.
“A glass of Merlot, please.” His order screams of class as well. Paula’s beer is looking mighty dull at this point. He is alone—no woman. A business man.
He swirls the wine in the glass, takes a whiff. “God, it’s so warm out there, isn’t it?”
“A little bit.”
He thanks the bartender for bringing the wine, then glances at the television she stares at. The game’s over, and only highlights are played. Night at a bar in the airport. His face has lines and freckles. It looks comfortably worn. Friendly.
“So where are you headed?” she asks.
He turns back to Paula, smiles again. Perfectly combed hair. His shoes shine like the brass bar below them.
She hears D.C., and purses her lips as she nods her head. “Good place, I hear.”
“Yea,” he says. “It’s great. Though it’s somewhat difficult to get around.” Only in a bar, and only at an airport.
“How so?”
“Well, people drive like maniacs.”
“Don’t go to L.A.,” she says.
“Why?”
“Driving,” she says, “is not easy to manage. Strange that it’s required of every human being within the county limits.”
He delivers an uneasy smile. Too many beers already on her tab.
“Come now. Are you perhaps being melodramatic?”
Paula is not being melodramatic. He waits and then glances across the bar to the rows of bottles.
“Well, I have been there. It’s not that the driving is bad, it’s just odd. Likewise, D.C. is very odd.”
“What’s odd in D.C.?” she asks.
“Driving… the people. Very pressured lifestyle, you know? I’ll often just find myself walking on streets in the middle of the night to free the mind a bit. It can be overwhelming.” One of those. Opens up easy, like a flower in the morning dewlight.
Paula says, “huh.”
He says he was visiting a sister. Probably another Nordic beauty, like him.
“How was she?”
“Good. She just recently moved out there.”
Her eyes are on the television. The Lakers are not doing well. A shame.
“So why is driving a pain in D.C.?”
“Ah well, everything is different. I’m just not used to it, I suppose. I tell my wife that…”
Wife. Unimportant. Something about a Mercedes.
The bartender says, “Your tuna melt and fries,” and she says “Wrap that up to go, please. And give me a shot of Jack.”
Paula drinks the shot and smiles; she has to go catch her flight. He smiles back and says it was nice to meet her. The momentary pause of consideration and wonder is lost in an instant as a loud paper bag is dragged along a bar and placed in a messenger bag, destined for the overhead storage compartment of an Embraer ERJ 145 on its way to Seattle.
She sits in the airport terminal for forty-five minutes and watches the lights slowly roll by the window as the arrivals are taxied into position.
A dimly lit airplane in the middle of the night is a den of philosophers. Travelers attempt to sleep as they reflect on the past and consider the future in the context of traveling aboard a time capsule. They enter, they sit, and just as quickly as they take off, they arrive at their destination. These people had lives and fly quickly back to those lives, but in the airplane in the middle of the night they are frozen. The forty-four minds are momentarily contained. The man in the brown waist-coat and spectacles reads the card detailing the airplane’s emergency procedures as if he intends to follow the procedures if the plane were to fall over the Cascades stretching north below them, as if he were not going to panic and groan to the Lord to save him. The tanned German teenager and her boyfriend in the pink hooded sweatshirt talk softly among themselves, holding secret conversations and expressing what seem like hidden desires but are in actuality thoughts about the parents they left behind in order to take a vacation. Paula, too, is deep in thought and passes the time by assuming and gleaning secrets about those around her.
Beyond a cough and a whisper there is silence, but silence screams loudest of all when every mind is abuzz with possibility and regret. Those left behind are remembered and those waiting for them are considered. The lights outside the window are few and far between, partially obscured by the engine located at the rear of the craft where she has been seated. Thunderous noise is not so noticeable when it is constant, and the silence remains undisturbed.
They do not serve meals on this flight.
The bus stop in front of an empty airport terminal at night is mostly devoid of life. Few people come and quickly go as they ride away in a taxi or hotel bus. There is no bus or taxi for her. She sits at the end of the curve in the road and watches the windows for approaching headlights from around the bend.
The air is cold here. Paula wonders if pigeons fly at night.
Buildings are cold and lifeless and they are designed for efficiency, a trait that is as useless to the heart of the mind as wings on an elephant. She is patient to an extent and impatient enough to sit, then stand, then pace from one end of the walkway to the other. Time passes in hours at first, then minutes.
As she ponders an action and all possible reactions she rests her hand on a messenger bag and finds strange warmth. Velcro tears open and inside is the wonderful smell of a tuna melt and fries. Flashes of hunger spring into her and the plastic box is torn open. Buttered bread, now soggy, slides into her hands. The aroma of shredded tuna fish whipped and spread with a tangy mayonnaise across the thick toast fills her nostrils and cause Paula to raise her head to the air for a heavy dose. A cold breeze blows through an aluminum bus stop’s slatted walls and moments later the tuna melt is in her hands and in her mouth, vanishing one bite at a time and difficult to swallow as she forces the clumps of softened food and wishes she had accepted the water bottle aboard the flight. The tuna melt is gone in the span of a few minutes and the warm stale fries shortly thereafter. She sits for a while as her esophagus is cleared and she returns to herself in the cold night at a bus stop at an airport. Reality is mere fantasy when there is nothing to keep a person grounded.
As the cold surrounds her she reaches into a gray nylon sack and removes from it a white towel, using it to envelop herself in shallow warmth. The white towel stands out against the surface of the night’s cloak, and she stares at the windows waiting for headlights that will never come.
“They’re always married,” she mumbles.