by Pico Iyer
“I’m sorry,” I responded, not very companionably. “I don’t speak Hindi.”
“You’re not Indian?”
“I am Indian, but …”
At that, he shuffled off, and the cashier wearily turned to another Indian, this one with a very shy bearing, and cried, “Clearasil? You want that for your face?”
A Frenchman was speaking his native tongue to another startled, though friendly, worker, trying to explain that he wanted his Hershey bar wrapped. (“A souvenir,” he said, switching to English. “A remember. From the war. The GIs used to give this same chocolate to me. I was four years old.”)
Meanwhile, Soldiers of the Cross of Christ Church were shaking tins by escalators, priests (or at least men dressed as priests) were approaching strangers with requests for money, and a sweet Brazilian girl (with a NONPROFIT, NONSECTARIAN badge that apparently allowed her to operate here) was pulling copies of a book called Renunciation out of a brown paper bag. Airports everywhere are places where hustlers try to sell displaced foreigners taxi rides, tours, and girls; in LA, I was amused to see, they were largely peddling salvation.
The most conspicuous characters in the departures terminal, though (partly because they were so much in possession of themselves), were tall, dark, extremely well dressed men in sober suits and ties who were circling around with clipboards, like UN diplomats on the loose. I saw one of them sidle up to a chic Taiwanese girl, who was clutching a copy of Mademoiselle, and flip open his folder to show her horrifying pictures of bodies being mutilated in Iran. I saw another accost two terrified-looking Japanese girls in BORN TO BE WILD California T-shirts and offer them evidence of Shiite torture. I saw them detain a blond girl and ask her (always urbanely and politely), “Excuse me. Where are you from?”
“Here,” she said. “But Denmark originally.”
The Iranian addressed her in fluent Danish, corrected her Californian inflections, and then, in her mother’s tongue, said sadly, “Good-bye, Danish girl.”
As soon as she walked away, he turned to me. “Excuse me. ¿Habla español?”
Traditionally, of course, what makes the airport unique (though now it is more and more common on every sidewalk in many cities) is that no one knows where anyone is coming from (in both the Californian and the global sense), and no one really knows where anyone is at. I spent one day walking around LAX with a blond Angeleno friend, and saw one Korean matron sweetly compliment her on her command of English, and another mujahedin (with who knows what intent) ask her if she were Indian.
Upstairs, where a group of students was gulping down “Dutch chocolate” and “Japanese coffee” and translating school from English to American (while learning—the hard way—that soliciting loses some of its cachet as it crosses the Atlantic), a large man was nuzzling the neck of his outrageously pretty Filipina companion, and a few Brits were staring, with undisguised skepticism, at an ad that said that seafood was “cheerfully served at your table!” (Only in America, they were doubtless thinking.) Women dressed as nurses rattled tins, others announced, “We serve the youth in getting off drugs,” and a shady man slipped from table to table, depositing on each one a key chain attached to a miniature globe. Whenever some unsuspecting victim picked one up—This really is the “Land of the Free,” he might have been thinking—the man suddenly appeared at his side, flashing a sign that said I AM A DEAF and requesting a compulsory “gift” of a dollar.
On my last trip back here, I now recalled, I had cross-questioned a Skynet computer in Osaka about what to expect in LA. “Guard against theft in the arrival hall,” it had advised me. “A thief is waiting to take advantage of you.” Elsewhere, it had offered, “Be on guard when approached by a group of suspicious-looking children, such as girls wearing bright-colored shirts and scarves.” Meanwhile, on TV monitors all around, amateurs had acted out minidramas of all the horrors awaiting unsuspecting Japanese at the other end—friendly strangers slipping them poisoned orange juices, room-service waiters pushing them to the ground, con men posing as limousine drivers, and just typical foreigners not specifying currencies when they made out a credit-card receipt.
Everyone, in fact, is on alert to some extent when he goes to the airport, and it is that sense of free-floating apprehension that all the life-insurance companies (and their spiritual equivalents) hope to turn to profit. “People are scared here,” a security guard told me as we inspected the X-ray machine he was supervising (security checks being a favorite place for criminals, who seize advantage of the general commotion, and the guards chattering in Tagalog while the passengers fret in Hindi, to whip bags off the belts). “Because undercover are working. Police are working. Three hundred and fifty police are here. You could be undercover, I could be undercover, who knows?”
Ten rival surveillance companies work the Bradley Terminal alone, and the arrivals hall seemed constantly to buzz with the whines and beepings of their paging devices and walkie-talkies. Everywhere, people were patting their pockets to make sure they had their IDs on them, or wondering if their valuables were on the far side of the planet. “You can’t say, ‘Don’t go there,’ ” an Englishwoman was telling a Mrs. Chang at the information desk. “The only thing we can say is, ‘Don’t go out at night. Watch yourself!’ ”
“Attention travelers,” the announcements went on and on. “You are not required to give money to solicitors. This airport does not sponsor their activities. I repeat …”
Airports, in fact, are charged zones, where we are regularly reminded to observe our mothers’ wisdom not to accept offers from strangers, and where the guidebooks tell us that most of the waiting taxi drivers are waiting to take us for a ride (no part of urban folklore, this was the issue covered on page one of the Airport Press magazine I picked up in LAX). These private anxieties are reinforced by all the public ones that gather around these places, famously “sensitive” areas where photographs are often prohibited, and khaki-clad soldiers patrol the tarmac, while, over to one side, a whole shadow world of stealth bombers and camouflaged helicopters, on covert operations, sits beside the bright official comings and goings of tourists. The airport is the place that is closed during coups, and the airport is the place where troublesome dissidents (like Ninoy Aquino) are sometimes shot; its dark lexicon of arteries and black boxes and manifests is made even darker by the images we carry with us of hijackers on the tarmac, and black-masked antiterrorist squads (the Unabomber, when jealous of the attention Timothy McVeigh was receiving, threatened to blow up LAX).
Almost everyone knows these days that she is twenty times more likely to die in a car crash than in a plane (and, in fact, three times more likely to die when an asteroid hits the earth), but still each of us brings more fear to an airport than she would to a cigarette or a Toyota or a tab of ecstasy. For every time a plane does crash, it is instantly front-page news—three hundred killed, not one—and all our Icarian fears, our sense that there is something not quite right, something inhuman and hubristic, about taking ourselves into the heavens, are rekindled. The KIA of Kennedy International Airport used to be said to stand, James Kaplan writes, for “killed in action,” and on the one occasion I took a tour of LAX with a public-relations official, she took pains to try to point out the skid marks on the tarmac that designated one of the highlights of the airport’s history (a hideous crash).
The other quality that ups the stakes in airports and places them in the rarefied company of luxury hotels and upscale shopping malls is that they are among the only sites in public life where immortals rub shoulders with the rest of us, and everyone is subject to the same rules (even Michael Jordan has to go through customs and even Queen Elizabeth has to deplane). The airport is not so dangerous as a typical inner-city Greyhound station, or Port Authority bus terminal in New York, say, because it doesn’t attract so many desperately poor people; yet it is more dangerous than any of those places for the same reason, which is that scores of rich people pass through, amidst the rest of us, tourist and terrorist, Olympia
n and Everyman, all thrown together into the same promiscuous mix.
Airports do what they can to segregate the privileged from the rest of us (indeed, the whole point of Business Class, a relatively new invention so popular that it has given rise to Executive Floors in hotels, and Gold Card lines at car-rental agencies, is that, if you pay two thousand dollars more, you can separate yourself from the riffraff for every step of your fifteen-hour trip, checking in at a separate line from them, waiting for your flight in a separate lounge, and then eating your nuts without being bothered by their cries, an expensive form of detachment nicely mocked by Virgin Airlines’ cheeky name for its top-flight seats, “Upper Class”). Once upon a time, England did not even accept “tourist-class” airline passengers (thus prompting the growth of Shannon in Ireland).
Yet for all such measures, terminals still speak to the anxieties rife in our borderless world, in which every kind of soul is thrown together in the Immigration line, and “affordable luxury” claims to make exclusiveness the right of all (lofty Harrods now sits next to a Metropolitan Museum of Art gift shop in Tokyo’s second-tier airport, while Wolfgang Puck offers Express pizza service in LAX; in one issue of Los Angeles magazine, the best bookstore in all of ten-million-strong, eight-area-code greater Los Angeles was pronounced to be the Waterstone’s in Terminal 1, “the very model of a small bookstore”). Thus airports offer the privileged every luxury except the one they really need—full privacy all the time—and so become the site of many of our tabloid sightings; Deepak Chopra is twiddling his thumbs next to me at the Silver Wings taco bar and Nicolas Cage is racing down the sidewalk to make his flight outside Terminal 4; once, in Terminal 2, I came upon a whole array of men in suits and girls with cornrows and kids with backpacks standing in front of a man with a beeper under his Warner Bros. T-shirt—a group of regular people, in short, acting as regular people in a movie.
The airport evokes, in fact, the very image one sees so often in the deeply poor cities of the world—in Port-au-Prince or Addis Ababa—where security posts and tall barbed-wire fences and armed guards separate those on the ground from those lucky enough to be flying in or out. The stranded ones peer through holes in the fence at the blessed ones able to be part of the global village.
In LAX, such signs of exclusiveness were most noticeable in the private terminal run by MGM Grand (or, since it traffics in distinctions, the “general aviation facility” run by MGM Grand), which stands by itself a long way from the rest of the passenger terminals, out amidst the warehouses along the Imperial Highway, which local workers know by the name of “Cargo City.”
On the afternoon I visited this last word in privacy, with its gold-fixture sinks and carpeted toilets (linked to a 5,005-room hotel in Las Vegas, and a thirty-three-acre theme park), it was to find it completely empty save for one morose Pakistani guard sitting above a motionless security belt. He’d been here for only four days, he told me, but already he’d seen displays of Croesan wealth beyond my imagining. Once, a 727 had flown in and disgorged exactly one passenger; another time, a plane had landed with only twelve on board. “All big shots come over this terminal,” he said, with more solemnity than pride. “You and me, small potatoes like us, we cannot come here.”
The final aspect of the security issue at LAX (which again reflects a world in which more and more of us are on foreign ground, surrounded by different values) is that of customs: if much of the public officiousness at airports is about guarding passengers from criminals, much of the rest of it derives from the fact that the passengers are themselves often criminal. The largest cash robbery in American history, at the time, was pulled off at JFK (Lucky Luciano actually died at an airport—on his way to meet a Hollywood producer); and in LAX, during my sojourn there, four Chinese men were apprehended as they tried to smuggle in whole gallbladders of Asiatic black bears, testicles of musk deer, rhinoceros-horn powder and tiger-bone plasters—$2 million worth of aphrodisiacs, all drawn from endangered species.
It has been known for people to try to smuggle fig trees on their persons into the Promised Land (the trunk hidden under their pants, the branches underneath their shirts), and in Japan it’s not unusual to hear of mobsters trying to smuggle Thai girls into the country, sometimes in their check-in bags. Cities like Bangkok famously see scores of Nigerians catching flights for Europe with entire inflatable balloons of heroin in their stomachs, and, in response to such scams, Singapore nearby precisely announces to all visitors on its disembarkation card, “DEATH for drug traffickers under Singapore’s law.”
In the Departures Hall of TBIT, therefore, I wasn’t wholly taken aback to find two large glass cases announcing TRAVELER BEWARE amidst the milling Iranians. Inside was a motley assembly of rhinoceros-horn cans, whales’ teeth, ivory Buddhas, heads of dead toucans, leopard skins (with heads attached), and a crocodile handbag belonging to Lai Ching Hsing of Beverly Hills. All this seemed a useful-enough caution, though it did go a little oddly with the Pandamonium display on the other side of the hall containing battery-operated pandas, panda Valentine cards, and a mannequin, chic behind a panda mask.
And in Osaka Airport, not far from the massage chairs rented by the hour, and a machine on which you can make business cards, I came upon an entire “CIQ” room that helpfully tells aspiring criminals everything they might want to know about their chosen profession. In one small case alone in the comfortable room (boys sprawled out around it, waiting for their flights) were replicas of paint thinners and diet pills, peyote buttons and “black mollies.” There were symbols of Valium and “microdots,” “pink ladies,” “red birds,” and “yellows”; and as I pored over the selection of roaches and “rainbows” and PCP black tar heroin, I realized once more that the airport was teaching me about worlds I hadn’t known existed.
“You could be undercover, I could be undercover, who knows?”
The defining paradox of the airport, though, is that it offers all these amenities to people who don’t really want to be there, and tries to divert people whose only attention is on when they can get out (the Sheremetyevo-2 transit zone in Moscow’s airport actually merits a paragraph in the UNHCR’s book, The State of the World’s Refugees, because at any given time up to twenty people are being held in its detention quarters). You can swim in a rooftop pool in Miami, I had read, or play in a meta-miniairport in O’Hare (complete with its own air-control towers and baggage claim areas); you can visit a micro-brewery in Bangkok, or explore hiking trails in Kuala Lumpur. Yet all these diversions feel a little like the images in Plato’s Cave (designed to keep people away from the world of flesh).
The language of airports has become the language of our private lives, as we speak of holding patterns and living on autopilot, fly-by-night operations and getting bumped. Yet the language we meet in airports is rigorously impersonal, all passive tense and “congestion-related flight delay.” We move from pedestrian walkway to terminal to concourse; we pass booth personnel and “Personal Assistance Training” rooms and “interior cosmetic upgrades.” The whole act of flying sensualizes us, but in an anonymous space, with the result that we’re lost in a free-floating state of temporary intimacy. Part of us is thinking of the “romance of travel,” as the ads for Singapore Airlines have it—the scene from Emmanuelle, or the Dating Channel on Virgin planes, whereby you can contact attractive strangers on your seat monitor (there are masseuses in Virgin’s Upper Class, hairstylists in its Club House lounge); yet the rest of us is conjugating “exit row” and “flotation device,” “gate lock” and “dwell time” and “safety procedures.”
I thought of all this as I walked and walked the long corridors of LAX, labyrinth leading into labyrinth, and uniformed personnel outside Jody Maroni’s Sausage Kingdom wearing name tags on their chests (BABY LEE REYNOLDS, NARITA WEISS). I recalled the eerie first sentence of Kathryn Harrison’s memoir of her love affair with her father—“We meet at airports”—and I thought of the friend who told me how, on an Aeroflot flight once, a stewardess h
ad invited him into a private room and given him a white-tablecloth meal and a taste of cross-cultural romance, high above the miles of snow and darkness in Siberia. When they landed, she waved good-bye, and he realized he didn’t even know her name.
Departure boards clicked over with their never-ending list of initials, digits, codes; passageways led to escalators that brought me into junk-food El Dorados where a robotic male voice next to a cash register intoned over and over some New Age chimes: “Spirit Worlds,” “Dolphin Sounds,” and “Piano Moods.”
The white zone is for loading and unloading only. No parking. Mr. Al Sharpton, Mr. Al Sharpton, please report to the white courtesy telephone. Mr. Al Sharpton, to the white courtesy telephone. Please maintain visual contact with your personal property at all times. All unattended baggage is subject to immediate removal.
Once, rousing myself from a daze, and not really sure of whether I was coming or going, I heard, “John Cheever. John Cheever. Please contact a Northwest representative in the Baggage Claim Area. John Cheever, please contact a service representative in the Northwest Baggage Claim Area.”
It could have been true, for all I know; people take on strange identities in airports.
And so, half-inadvertently, not knowing whether I was facing east or west, not knowing whether it was night or day, I slipped into that peculiar state of mind—or no-mind—that belongs to the no-time, no-place of the airport, that out-of-body state in which one’s not quite there, but certainly not elsewhere. My words didn’t quite connect, and the world came to me through panes of soundproof glass. I felt myself in a state of suspended animation, five miles above the sea—sleepy, light-headed, unsure of how much pressure to put on things. I had entered the stateless state of jet lag.