Greg Baxter - Munich Airport

Is this what you were going to show me?

I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I said, Well, um…

She stood and threw the bandage at my face.

Were you trying to be funny?

No, no, not at all, not a bit, no, I’m sorry, I hadn’t even thought of that.

I took her hands. I apologized again. Then I said, I did it myself, with a knife. She looked at the wound and said, What kind of knife? A steak knife, I said.

Why?

I have no idea, I said. I was in Luxembourg with my father, we’d been arguing.

Anna’s eyes got very wide. Then she put her hand to her mouth. I thought, Now I had better get dressed and get out of here. But she started to laugh, she laughed through the hand that was covering her mouth. I’m sorry, she said, I don’t mean to laugh. And then she laughed some more. That’s okay, I said. She knelt back down, picked up the bandage, and taped it to my body.

I got home — to the penthouse apartment — at around two a.m., and my father was awake. He had gone to sleep around nine, but, he said, he woke at eleven, and now he couldn’t sleep. He was sitting in front of the television, watching a dubbed Hollywood movie. He turned it off. I had a glass of water. I had such a headache. I could taste blood in my mouth. I felt like my teeth were going to fall out. I felt like if I brushed them, they would crumble out like teeth in a dried-up jawbone. How did your drinks go? he asked. I said, They went well. He said, I’m sorry I didn’t make it, Trish came over, we didn’t have the energy to travel across the city. That’s fine, I said. He said, You meet anybody interesting? I said, I met an artist who wanted to sleep with me because I lied and told her we were Jewish. He said, That’s a funny way to play a trick on somebody. Then he disappeared into his room.

Trish called the phone in the apartment at nine in the morning, and it rang and rang and rang, because neither my father nor I had the energy to get out of bed. Then I got a matter-of-fact message on my phone. Miriam’s body would be released. And that was effectively the end. I woke my dad up, showered, and trimmed and shaved my beard.

My phone starts ringing, but my hands are full of bags, and anyway I can see Trish already, she has her phone out, she’s calling me. She is standing and my father is sitting. I shout. I say, Ho there, ahoy! They look over and I raise the bags in the air. They look at me in horror. First I think the horror is a response to the bags and bags of clothes, but then I realize that the wound is bleeding again and my brand-new shirt is ruined. What the hell happened to you? my father asks. Ah, shit, I say, forget it, can we move? We need to get you some help, says Trish. What the hell happened? my father asks. I say, I crashed my bike, got scraped by something metal, weeks ago. My father says, I told you, you’re crazy riding that bike. What’s in the bags? asks Trish. Suits, I say. You should really get that looked at, she says. I put the bags down and pull up my shirt. It looks worse than it is. I try to explain this. I say, if I go get this looked at, we’re going to miss our flight. He’s got a point, says my father. My father looks worse than when I left him. I say, I’ll get fixed up in a bathroom near the gate.

Maybe we should go, says my father, it will be a long walk. Yes, we should go, says Trish. I’m ready, I say. Then my father says, I like your headphones. I take them from around my neck and let him try them out. He puts them on and says, Nice. Hold on, I say, listen to this. And then I play him some music. What the hell is that? he says. I say, Sorry, and play him something else. I hand him my phone. I gather up our cases and bags. He takes the headphones off, gives everything back to me and says, They sound expensive. He holds them by the headband and says, They weigh expensive. How much did you spend? Trish says to my father, Let’s get a cart to drive you. My father says, I can make it.

We start to walk. We leave our seats beside the history exhibit. We enter the mouth of the tunnel that leads to our gate. The tunnel is tremendously wide, like the deck of a ship, and it gently descends. The roof of the tunnel is glass and arched. We have a good view of the tarmac and the planes, and the green beyond the airfield, and the mountains. It is easy to see how crisp and cold it must be. We arrive at some escalators. The people all around us hurry down them. But we stand. We wait. We breathe. We go very still and don’t speak. It is such a long way down.

In about twenty hours, my father and I will be driving through a swamp, and the night will have heat in it, and there will be mosquitoes. Every time I’ve been home, I’ve come home on a hot night. I always fly through either Atlanta or Houston, and in the jetways there I get a sense of the heat and humidity, but then I’m back in the coolness of the airport for a while. I tend to get stuck with long layovers. I plug my laptop in somewhere and write a bunch of e-mails about work I’ve been doing on the flight. After an hour or so I pack up my computer and find a big window to sit by, and I watch the planes taxi around in the hot afternoon. I always feel as though it’s been a lifetime since I last visited — or else I wish it were. I feel old. I feel as though the life I might have had there has become unattainable. Even in my twenties I felt like that. After a while I leave the window and go find a bar that serves food and has a lot of televisions. I forget sometimes that I, too, as an American, love to watch sports and financial news on screens next to each other, or boxing on one screen and baseball on the other, or two football games at the same time. Or all these things on half a dozen screens in a row. I am pretty sure that if I had stayed in the US, even if I had gone somewhere with an intellectual life, such as New York, I’d have never learned anything about music. I’d have stopped reading all books but sports biographies and political or financial nonfiction. I’m quite lucky to have escaped American sports. While I’m eating and drinking, I keep a close eye on the time. I wait until the last call, then I walk to my gate. I traverse another jetway and board the plane, and I look to see if there is anybody I know. There never has been. Then we land, and it’s dark. It’s a little cooler but no less humid. My father waits for me in the little terminal. We wait for my bag together, then we walk outside to the parking garage. He always lets me drive. We get home quite late and I grab a beer from the fridge. I spray myself with mosquito repellent, I go outside and light some citronella candles in a bucket, I turn on the UV bug lights, and we sit and drink quietly together. He might say it’s nice to have me back at home, and I might say how much I’ve been looking forward to the warm nights. The house has not changed since my mother died. The carpets are the same, the walls the same coat of paint, the same old paintings. The same tableware, silverware, glasses, and coffee mugs. I suspect my mother’s clothes are still folded in her dresser, her coats and dresses still hanging in her closet. Nothing has been moved, not the dressers, not the nightstands, not the mirrors, not the paintings. Only the television, so my father can watch it in the room nearest to the swimming pool. Everything is cleaned once a week, but nothing is rearranged. My room, which is exactly as it was when I was twenty, is right next to Miriam’s room. My father’s room is a long way away. Not because the house is particularly big, though it isn’t small, but because it’s such a maze, and on so many levels. It’s a house that resembles madness, that never comes together, that will go on confusing you forever, and which even has dead ends — you walk around a few corners, find a door, and behind that door is a boiler. It’s the only door down that hallway. What in the world is it doing there? There are hallways that connect two entrances to the same room. There are rooms that you must go through rooms to reach. There is a big kitchen and a small kitchen. It is the kind of place two people could inhabit without ever encountering each other, unless they went swimming — there is only one swimming pool.