Stephen White - Blinded

“Thanks,” I said.

Lauren smiled warmly. “This all happened in California, didn’t it?”

I smiled back. My smile was kind of sick.

As if on cue, our daughter’s throaty wail pierced the quiet.

Lauren was right in her prediction. Neither of us got much sleep that night.

The whole country had seen a single, grainy, black-and-white security photograph of my Tuesday eight o’clock. Her likeness had been on TV, in the newspapers, in magazines, on the Internet-anywhere a picture could be plastered. But as far as I knew, I was the only person who could actually put a name to the infamous photo.

Who was she? My first patient was an overstressed sales executive named Sharon Lewis who worked out the Diagonal at a company called Micro Motion. A fortnight plus one day before, at almost the exact same hour when she and I were sitting down for her second psychotherapy session, Sharon had been hustling to recover from a blown tire on the Boulder Turnpike that had caused her to arrive much too late for her flight at Denver International Airport. Her tardy arrival meant that she had exactly thirty-three minutes to get from her car in the parking garage to the B Concourse to catch her plane to Houston for a sales meeting that she absolutely couldn’t miss.

Denver ’s airport was always a mob scene on Monday mornings, and Sharon jogged into the terminal to discover that the post-9/11 security station was already jammed with an army of impatient briefcase warriors charging out on their weekly business patrols.

Sharon was schlepping her rolling suitcase on board the plane and wasn’t surprised that she was immediately jostled by federal security personnel into a cutback queue that was moving like the blood of a glutton after a meal at Morton’s.

When she finally arrived at the front of that line, she was directed toward a shorter line at an X-ray machine, where she was once again forced to cool her heels. She found herself behind a family of six who were behaving as though they’d never confronted a magnetometer in their entire lives. Each of them had more metal secreted on their bodies than Edward Scissorhands at a piercing convention.

After a lifetime’s worth of sighs and rolled eyes, Sharon finally cleared herself through the metal detector where she was-no surprise-selected for a secondary security screening by a large, taciturn woman armed with an electronic wand and an attitude.

By her own admission Sharon Lewis was the type of person who tailgated mercilessly, who counted items in the baskets of those in front of her in the supermarket express lane, and whose idea of a vacation was an uninterrupted bath. Her friends-and there were precious few of those-would call her intolerant.

While waiting impatiently for her turn to be wanded by the uniformed woman she was certain was an ex-Marine, Sharon saw from a fleeting glance at her watch that she had nine minutes remaining to get to her gate to catch her flight to Houston. That meant she had only nine minutes to accomplish all of the following: to get past this grizzly bear of a security officer, to hustle downstairs to board the train, to make it down the track two stops to B Concourse, and then to run like hell all the way to Gate 19, which, of course, was almost the farthest possible gate location from the concourse train station.

It was then-at the crucial moment of her morning endurance trial when she looked at her watch and did the calculations-that Sharon Lewis made a memorably bad decision.

The infamous photograph of her-that grainy one that just about everyone had seen and that anyone who had ever been inconvenienced at any airport anywhere in the world had cursed-had run in that week’s Time magazine with the telling caption:THE MOST SELFISH WOMAN IN AMERICA.

How had Sharon earned the title?

Sharon had gazed around the bustling security area and concluded that no one was paying any particular attention to her, especially not the gruff woman with the wand, who at that moment was busy assisting an elderly Asian gentleman with an aluminum cane remove his wingtips. The fact that Sharon was being totally ignored not only infuriated her but also permitted her an odd sense of freedom. She was tired of waiting for her turn to be wanded. She was tired of things going wrong that morning. She was, as she put it to me later, “tired of counting idiots.”

Her flight to Houston was minutes away from leaving Denver without her.

What did Sharon do? She took things into her own hands. She proceeded to lift the black nylon band from the security corral in which she was penned, casually slipped through to the other side, replaced the band into its track, grabbed her rolling suitcase off the stainless steel table where it awaited her post-X ray, and strutted-unimpeded-toward the escalators.

Less than a minute later she pushed her way in front of yet another old man-this one was in a wheelchair-to squeeze onto a departing train that carried passengers from the terminal to the distant concourses.

News reports revealed that eight minutes passed after Sharon removed herself from the secondary screening queue before the security force in the terminal-tipped off by a passenger who had been waiting behind Sharon-ascertained that their security perimeter had been intentionally breached. Within two minutes all the airport’s security checkpoints were closed. Four minutes after that the trains to the concourses were shut down. And a couple of minutes after that, planes at the gates were directed to stop boarding, planes that were taxiing were ordered to return to their gates, and procedures were initiated to sanitize the concourses and return everyone to the main terminal to once again pass through the interminable maze of security.

Later, when supervisors reviewed the security tape of the incident, the authorities were able to isolate a terribly grainy picture of Sharon Lewis strolling unhindered around the boundary of the secondary security screening area, her suitcase trailing behind her.

But the security personnel didn’t know it was Sharon Lewis who had caused the entire system to grind to a halt. They didn’t know that the person who was responsible for costing tens of thousands of passengers precious hours and the airline industry millions of dollars in delayed and canceled flights all across the nation was a Boulder business executive. All they knew was that the culprit was a thin woman with dirty blond hair, about five six or five seven, wearing a black suit with a white blouse and tugging a rolling suitcase.

Sharon? She didn’t know what the fuss was all about because by the time DIA was shut down, her United Airlines flight to Houston had just gone nose up. She only learned about the repercussions of the incident later that day. The buyer from the company she was visiting in Texas told her the entire story, describing the woman who had skirted security as “that self-centered bitch who shut down DIA.”

She’d smiled wanly at him through her nausea. But, she assured me later, she’d closed the sale.

For the two weeks since the breach at DIA federal law enforcement authorities had been searching desperately for the woman in the grainy security photograph. They wanted to arrest her, convict her, fine her, and imprison her, though not necessarily in that order. From the tone of the public discourse that followed the incident, drawing and quartering didn’t seem to have been totally ruled out as a punitive option, either.

But no one knew who she was, or where she was.

Except for me. And my lips were sealed.

After Sharon ’s visit at eight o’clock I had another patient at eight forty-five. And another at nine-thirty. Yet another at ten-fifteen. A scheduled break at eleven o’clock to catch my breath-and cram in a visit to the toilet-was sacrificed for a follow-up session with Gibbs. My bladder wasn’t happy.