Greg Baxter - Munich Airport

Outside the airport, the day is clear, at last. The fog has evaporated. The sun is near its apex, but it is still low in the sky, and through the tinted glass of the terminal its light makes blue dusk. The temperature inside the terminal has gone up, or the temperature inside me has gone up. I have to take off my heavy coat. I simply leave it on the floor and make a mental note of where it is, so I can retrieve it later, though I have no intention of retrieving it. It’s a coat I’ve owned for several years. I wore it the last time I saw Miriam. But I cannot wear it any longer. I cannot even carry it. I take off my suit jacket and sweater, too. My shirt is wet from perspiration. There is nowhere to sit or relax, so I kneel. I just kneel down in the middle of a crowd of people. Then I put on my sunglasses. I don’t even stop to worry that people will think I look stupid with sunglasses on. The funny thing is that nobody notices, or nobody cares. I bought this pair of sunglasses the day I arrived in Berlin, or the day after. I also started growing a beard the day I arrived in Berlin. It got pretty long. It had some gray in it, which surprised me. I thought about keeping it, growing it for a few months. But I shaved the beard two days ago. The sunglasses are a pair of tortoiseshell Ray-Ban Wayfarers. I have not owned a pair of sunglasses that cost more than ten pounds since I moved to London. If it was sunny, I either squinted or went and got a cheap pair at a gas station or the checkout aisle at a supermarket. The Wayfarers cost me two hundred euro. When I saw my father later that day he said, Are those new? I said, I think these are the best sunglasses I’ve ever owned. He said — with a little amusement, because I suppose there’s nothing quite so ordinary as ordinary Wayfarers — I’m glad I was here to see them. I said, I think they make me look like Huey Lewis. Who? he said. During our trip around the Rhineland, I wore them every day. It seems to me, sometimes, that I wore them to sleep, wore them at breakfast, wore them in the shower.

Right beside me — I am kneeling down, it turns out, at the Copenhagen gate — are a handsome couple, and they are wearing sunglasses. The woman is pretty and has long arms and legs, and I smile at her. But she is not looking at me. She is looking at her phone. The man is large and muscular, though he wears very dainty, white, woven-leather shoes, and shiny white pants. He is shaved bald, probably a little younger than me, and he has a strong chin. He is, or seems to be, checking his fingernails. Admiring his fingernails, or the perfection of his fingers. My, my, he thinks, in whatever language he thinks, what fingers I have, women love these fingers. The woman is tanned and also muscular, fortyish. I have never seen listlessness like her listlessness. She is sending somebody a message. She is not the kind of person who uses her phone for anything other than text messages, or sending photographs — she does not even use it for telephone calls. She has an expensive smartphone, but if somebody ever said, Please check your phone for the weather, or asked how to spell something, she would have to text the question to somebody who would look it up for her. She wears tight, dark-blue jeans and a black top that reveals one shoulder and hangs loosely from the other shoulder, and little black shoes. Her hair is in a ponytail. Her sunglasses are large and green-black, and momentarily she seems to notice that I am observing her. The green-black lenses of her glasses fix upon me for a moment, then release. The man says something to her, perhaps he has finally grown tired of silently admiring his hands and has decided to tell her how much women adore his hands. She looks at him when he speaks, or almost at him, but she makes no expression. And when he is finished speaking, she returns to her phone. On the other end of these texts, I imagine an equally listless woman chronicling an equally unbearable lull in some other place. But this conversation started years ago and will never end, and it has nothing to do with airports or delays. One could be at the Met, listening to The Magic Flute , while the other might be sitting in the Musée de l’Orangerie, surrounded by Monet’s Water Lilies , and they would be writing to each other of the unbearable quality of these scenes, the noises and these images, and these people. They never encountered a plate of food, no matter how ingenious or expensive or tasty, that they smiled at. They never drank a glass of wine that tasted nice. They never saw a landscape worth a photograph. They take photographs of things like fat people, or handbags, and send them to each other. Instinctively they know that personalities are signs of weakness, or symptoms of self-deceit. A man with a personality is a coward. A woman with a personality is insane. Nobody has more personality than a fat, stupid, cowardly man, or a fat, stupid, insane woman. I would like to get a week with a woman like this woman, not to love or be loved, or for conversation, but to be near her in restaurants, to return her plates of food for being imperfect, to return her drinks for being insults. And to lie beside her in hotel beds while she watches television.

I get a text from Trish that asks if I am on my way. I send one back — I am, but it will be a few more minutes. The terminal, because the weather has finally improved, and because flights are starting to depart, has reached the edge of apoplexy. I stand. I put my suit jacket back on. My teeth ache. My head aches. My eyes ache. And all these aches seem distantly related to the problem of what to do with my sweater, and the consequences of leaving it behind and the burden of taking it with me. Will someone notice that I’m leaving coats and sweaters behind, and will this cause a security problem? Will I get the chills and want my sweater back? Will I regret leaving my nice coat, or have I begun to regret it already? I am sinking and my heart starts to palpitate. I throw the sweater partially underneath the seat of the man in the white, woven-leather shoes, and this makes me feel better. Ahead of me, between where I am and the airport plaza, and beyond, presumably where Trish and my father are, are thousands of people. It has the feel of a great, collective departure, the kind you might imagine at a train station, just before the war. I start to move. I stop at a café and ask for a bread roll, no butter, no jam, just some bread, and this causes some confusion until I tell them the bread is for my son, that he won’t eat anything but bread. They give it to me in a napkin. I take a bite immediately. Then I walk to a high table by the counter where some people are already sitting and put my elbows on it, lean over, and eat some more, taking tiny bites. The first few bites make me nauseous, but as they settle in my stomach I feel a little improvement. I put the rest of the bread down beside the people I’ve annoyed by claiming a space in their privacy, and I place a euro on the counter by the cash register, since I can see that the staff are disgusted with me for lying about my son. Lines have formed at the mouth of every gate, and each line stretches for fifty yards or more, and you cannot pass through them, or you can, but you must first explain that your gate is elsewhere, that you are merely passing through. Even then, they give you looks that say, I’m stuck, I can’t move, why have you picked me to irritate? You take the inch they give you, and you try to make sure your rolling case knocks their case over, or runs over their toes, or knocks their child over, so that you can give them a look that says, See what you made me do by pretending you could not move? They close the space while you are still in it, you get squeezed out. It is all completely automatic and emotionless. You never look back. Gate after gate, this repeats. It is as though the people who have rushed into position — who will refuse, once boarding begins, to accept that the passengers behind them in the line, who are in rows fifteen through thirty, for instance, have priority — believe that Copenhagen, Budapest, Vienna, Madrid, Kiev, Amman, Helsinki, and Tel Aviv are not hundreds or thousands of miles away but just on the other side of the gates, just down the jetway.