by Pico Iyer
By now, like more and more of us, I’m no stranger to this no-man’s-land, a realm of spaced-out dreaminess where something in one doesn’t engage, and something else comes loose, so one is left either skating giddily, heart wide open, on the surface of oneself or feeling mysteriously clogged somehow, heart-high in mud. Every few weeks, quite often, I fly from Japan to California, and find myself revved up, speedy, all adrenaline as I touch down, with my mind turned off and my defenses flung open. I write wildly emotional letters to people I’ve hardly met, and get shaken and moved by every film I see, as if truly under some foreign influence (the wonder drug of displacement). On the way back, I end up at the other pole, reluctant for days to get out of bed, with every book or thought I entertain seeming leaden. My words have not caught up with me—it’s as if they are pieces of luggage that the airline has misplaced and sent on by a later flight—and it is only slowly, day by day, that I come back into focus, until, at last, perhaps a week after I’ve returned, I wake up one morning (at a normal hour) and realize that I’m reassembled, intact, here.
All this, of course, is nothing more than a matter of biorhythms and “circadian rhythm upsets,” as they say, and is only an accelerated, compacted form of that process whereby we feel differently, and occupy different moods, at 8:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. A “morning person” stays awake and throbs all night on jet lag, and doctors reassure us that moroseness and even cataracts and high-frequency hearing loss are to be expected from this constant crisscrossing of time lines. But what is interesting—in part because so new—are the less calculable effects of this modern whirl, or the ones it’s still too early for scientists to gauge. Humanity today is facing all kinds of sudden jerks it’s never known before, and many of us embrace this phenomenon—the definition of possibility—without knowing what the consequences will be. The average person today sees as many images in a day as a Victorian might have in a lifetime; but compounding, and confusing, this are the shifts in place and mind we experience that Sigmund Freud and Oscar Wilde could not have imagined. We wake up, orphaned, in West Hollywood and go to sleep, surrounded by our parents, in medieval Kathmandu; we zigzag across centuries as if they were just settlements in a village.
As I wandered through the long gray terminals of LAX for day after day, and through departure lounge after departure lounge, I realized how many of the people around me were sleepwalkers, too, on edge, wound up, trying to bring the twilight zone inside them in sync with the hazy sunshine all around. I saw people, opened up, pouring their life stories out to strangers (and other people making new life stories with the strangers they began embracing); I saw people reaching out to one another with the jangled camaraderie of survivors at sea. I saw people slip around disappointment and hide their relief behind strong makeup. “People get ugly here,” a woman who’d worked as a Travelers Aid volunteer for seventeen years told me. “I no longer think of travel as very pleasurable. It’s really only travail.” Those around her, over and over, likened the airport to a hospital, where people break down or through, in extreme states of exhaustion or emotion.
Time itself plays strange tricks around the airport, as we routinely wake up in Tokyo today and arrive in LA last night. Everyone’s looking at his watch in departure lounges, but all the watches show different times. People tap their fingers, stretch their legs, pace restlessly back and forth in terminals; they also run in them (like O. J. Simpson in the Hertz commercial), hurdling obstacles and brushing past strangers who stare at them listlessly from their different worlds. Airports are among the only places in our lives where we sometimes have to wait for six hours, or eight, or even ten; where we are actually paid off for waiting with free hotel rooms, or offered two hundred dollars in cash if we will voluntarily wait another three hours. Events are bunched up weirdly (like the people suddenly primitive, pushing their way towards the counter), and time slips and stretches as in the final eleven seconds of a basketball game, which takes fifteen minutes to play out on TV.
I think sometimes we become children again in airports, irresponsible and without stewardship, of course, as I was as a nine-year-old in Heathrow; but also spoiled and denied and restless and bemused all at once. One of the odd things about airports (like every other modern convenience) is that the instruments we make to serve us always hold us hostage, and many of the people in gate lounges are clearly frustrated because they’re at the mercy of forces they can’t understand or control—red-eyed, bored, waiting to be transported.
In our worst moments, in fact, it can seem as if the airport is an anthology of modern ills—we munch fast food in a transit lounge amidst the beeps of Mortal Kombat machines and the anonymous props of a motel, the sleek shops and cold screens undermined somehow by the paper cups and sniffling noses, the sense of people at loose ends. Neil LaBute’s audaciously heartless independent movie, In the Company of Men, about two young executives on an out-of-town trip who decide not to take with them the most fundamental rules of humanity, begins, perfectly, in a departure lounge in some Nowhere International late at night. A land of fluorescent lights and empty hotels, garment bags and shoeless men in suits. The nighttime start of a journey into an amoral zone where we are not ourselves, and so anything is possible (the film’s most brutal scenes of calculated heartbreak take place in a borrowed hotel room).
Airports can be vertiginous places because we have nothing to hold our identities in place there; the most fundamental things are up for grabs. Heathrow, writes John le Carré, referring to a Russian spy, “is one of Checheyev’s favorite places. He can take rooms there by the half day, he can rotate hotels and fancy himself anonymous.” Gander Airport in Newfoundland is famous for only one reason: it is the place where for years people became someone else, as Cubans and other Communists, briefly touching down for refueling, would race across the tarmac or hide in bushes, effectively saying, I am no longer who I used to be. My new self starts today.
One day in Kyoto, staying at the Holiday Inn, I returned to LAX in a dream, and found myself taking the shuttle bus round and around, looking for a hotel in which to stay. The other people on the bus were all disheveled immigrants, looking for a job, and speaking not a word of English, and so all of us went round in circles, archetypal residents of that running in place that becomes part of the airport state of mind.
In LAX, as the days went on, I found myself gravitating towards the center stage of this area of transformations, the Arrivals Hall in the International Terminal. Planes themselves are often backstages of a kind, where we can see women hastily applying lipstick and checking themselves out in mirrors as the pilot says, “We’re beginning our descent” (while men often stash romantic keepsakes in the innards of their briefcases as soon as the pilot announces, “Flight attendants, prepare for takeoff”). But the fascination of the terminals themselves is that they become a public forum for the most private of transactions. In poor countries, the center of poignancy is usually around the departure gates, where a prize student takes off into a new life, leaving tens of friends and relatives sobbing behind him. In a place like LAX, the center of intensity is the arrivals area, as people who’ve been dreaming all their lives, often, of the place they’ve seen on-screen (in the Santa Barbara soap opera I saw for the first time in an Indian Airlines terminal, or the California Dreams sitcom shown on the government educational channel in Japan) meet, for the first time, the American Reality.
I took to spending more and more time, then, making myself at home in the airport, in front of the huge mural of Desertland, which dominates the first floor of TBIT, and it was easy to feel as if I were watching people extending their hands across centuries, or chasms they hadn’t known to exist before. Most of the souls around me, waiting for arriving planes, looked to be recent immigrants, dressed to show off their ease in their new homes, and gazing towards the customs door as towards some fragment of their past; and most of the ones walking out were probably the same people a few years before. The only currency common to both sides of the fence
was America, as the arrivals, very often, came in loaded high with Schwarzenegger videos and John Cougar Mellencamp tapes, dressed in cowboy hats and 49ers jackets and all the symbols of America that mean most when you’re a long way away from it. And the people waiting to greet them, in many cases, were now Americans in a deeper sense, so that Chiang Hsieng found his niece called herself Cindy now, and had a ring in her nose that glinted as she rubbed herself against that surfer from Berlin.
“Is there a lot of heavy people in Germany?” a sleek Russian blonde called Natasha asked her German friend from California. “Look how they walk the same way. So military.”
Next to her, Dr. An, from Monterey Park, was waiting for the flight from Kuala Lumpur, with a yellow rose in his hand, and a copy of a dental magazine, and a young wife from Sri Lanka was circling around with three cases on a baggage cart, wondering whether this was how her marriage would end up.
A little Filipina girl came out of air lock with Fred Flintstone in one arm and a panda in the other, and two lanky giants loped out in Aerial Assault sneakers, fresh from playing some exhibition games in Mexico. People shuffled up to one another, faces crumpled, so that it was clear that this was an antechamber of a funeral; other people clapped, bought eighteen-inch Mylar balloons, and wildly waved the flag of Mexico. An old Japanese man came in and said, “Tadaima!”—the ritual greeting used when one arrives back home (a grandson dutifully replied, “Okaeri!”); a Thai girl filed out in thigh-high boots with a sandy-haired son whose name she couldn’t pronounce. Some people came out with the spoils of war, like Odysseus from his travels: new mothers for their children, fresh business cards from Shanghai, ways of saying sorry in Korean, macadamia nuts from Oahu. Others came out with next to nothing, Mexicans in trainers that said UNIVERSITY OF SEÑOR FROG’S DRINKING TEAM, Southeast Asians with logos that declared, for some reason, THE VERY LAST VIKING.
Every few minutes, the whole area (like LA itself, it was tempting to think) was made over by the latest wave of newcomers, as, in a single hour, planes disgorged passengers from Taiwan, England, the Philippines, Mexico, Austria, Spain, Costa Rica, Germany, and Guatemala. And each of them brought a new mood and rhythm to the terminal—mornings, the blue blazers and white shirts around the early flights from Tokyo; afternoons, a flood of tropical colors from the Hawaiian Air arrivals. And what was waiting for all the new entries—a distilled version of their future—were Indians wagging heads, Iranians kissing one another smackily on the cheeks, Okinawan honeymooners in color-coordinated outfits, and girls in hot pants who looked very much like the ones you didn’t talk about at home. The most startling initial surprise, surely, for many immigrants in LA was that they were arriving in a land full of other immigrants who looked nothing at all like the Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer they’d seen on TV; the land of mom and apple pie was a place of tacos and udon and Wiener schnitzel.
I think this shock of discovery—a feature of our global village—is especially acute in LA, just because the city is the world capital of illusion, a kind of terminal of dreams where so many people come expressly to “arrive” (more than half of all passengers here come for pleasure). When we think of London or Paris, say, most of us imagine the Houses of Parliament or the Eiffel Tower; some image—from a Monet watercolor or a Hardy novel read in school—that stands in front of us imposingly. When we think of LA, often, we think, by contrast, of backdrop: beaches and bikinis and palm trees and sun. There is a sense that we can fit ourselves into its 2-D scenes, as seen in Baywatch or E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, and that what it is offering is less history than lifestyle (which is available to all). Perhaps the greatest danger of our global community is that the person in LA thinks he knows Cambodia because he’s seen The Killing Fields on-screen, and the newcomer from Cambodia thinks he knows LA because he’s seen City of Angels on video.
And as I stood among the chadors and tribal flags and Mickey and Minnie balloons in Terminal 4, I felt I could see how transitions that had looked so easy at home suddenly gaped huge. A Confucian couple from the countryside near Kwangju comes out into the bright light of a culture where people take courses in “parenting” and regard old age as an embarrassment to be covered up. An Indian woman exits with her hand in that of her husband, and he drops it as soon as he sees his friends from Intel, leaving her to walk behind and get coffee for the males.
A man leads out his young bride from Chiang Mai (young enough to be his daughter, his son thinks, with a variety of emotions, and dark enough to be his housemaid), and she sees a Buddha statue in that ad for Clinique.
So many of the new arrivals in LAX were coming, clearly, with memories of centuries-old rivalries in their heads, or of thirteenth-century mullahs, and they were arriving in a city that traditionally is as forgetful as the morning, where World War II was mostly a backdrop on a studio lot and people thought of themselves as works in progress, in the middle of a thirteenth rewrite. The airport seemed a kind of abolition of history, for people who sometimes had little else.
And, more than anywhere I knew, the terminal seemed a place where no one knew whom she would meet, even if it was a sweetheart she had kissed good-bye three weeks before, or a daughter she had protected every day for twenty years. And though this has been true of ports and stagecoach stops for centuries, it has surely never had an intensity or speed akin to that of the modern airport, where Henry James dramas are played out to an MTV beat. If airports have some of the exhilaration of bars—strangers here for an hour—they also have much of the poignancy of bars: a pretty Korean girl dressed in tiny shorts and a halter top sits alone in a deserted Baggage Claim area, waiting to be claimed, I guess, by a friend who never shows; a Vietnamese man, lost, tells officials he has friends in Orange County, but when the friends from Orange County are called, they say they know no one from Vietnam.
“Michael, is that you?”
“Sorry, I didn’t recognize you.”
“You haven’t changed at all.”
“Nor you. It was just—just, I guess, the clothes.”
We can make games and adventures out of this strangeness, go to love hotels where the beds are shaped like airplanes, or the Arty Space Airport Bar that graces Kyoto’s entertainment district; we can relish the slippery glamour of a place where everyone can be anyone for a while. But the quality that underwrites all of this is vulnerability, the exposedness we feel whenever we’re in a place we don’t understand, but compounded many times over when we’ve just descended thirty thousand feet.
One LA psychiatrist, a local woman told me, counseled women to work around their shyness by going to LAX to practice boldness. “Pick a nation whose people you find attractive,” she told them, “and go to the arrivals gate at a time when people from that place are disembarking. Then stare every eligible male in the eye for a full thirty seconds—they’ll be disconnected anyway, and you’ve got the home-court advantage.” I imagined these men disembarking, completely at a loss, and issuing into a hall where lots of single women were staring at them for a full thirty seconds, and I thought that one LA myth, at least, might prove to come true.
It was strange, I thought, as I roamed the Arrivals area, that the airport was the place I thought of as my home from home, the site of some of my most resonant childhood memories; for many of the people around me, especially the ones who’d just deplaned, it was clearly a zone of uncertainty and excitement, all the alien tinglings that attend any entry into a new life and a new world.
In W. G. Sebald’s determinedly melancholy, death-haunted vision, an airport becomes, quite literally, a terminal zone, “like an ante room of that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns,” as people sit in chairs in bright and sterile spaces—the hospital again—and, one by one, disappear as their names or departures are called out; yet for many of those coming to LAX, it surely marks their first encounter with a provisional kind of heaven, and a release from a longtime containment. To try to appreciate better what it could mean to such a migrant, I
took a flight in from Osaka and tried to imagine myself a newcomer arriving in the place he’d always dreamed of.
The first rule for ensuring a happy reception in LA is to arrive after nightfall, when the city settles into a shining grid of buzzing energies, laid out with the well-ordered mystery of the back of a transistor radio (in the metaphor of Thomas Pynchon’s that hypnotized us in high school), or the field of lights panned across in a hundred LA movies. “Flying in at night,” I read Jackie Collins declaring in Los Angeles magazine, while I was staying at the airport, “is just an orgasmic thrill.”
By day, however, the sight is less transporting: the city announces itself, most often, through a thick layer of brown haze as a mess of dun-colored warehouses comes into sight, and dirty ribbons of freeway clotted with trickles of slow-moving cars—a no-colored blur, really, without even the lapis ornaments (of swimming pools) that light up the residential areas of Johannesburg or New York.
My own plane hovered down through the haze and landed in front of a hangar that said T ANS RLD AIRLINES, and a sign welcoming us all to TOM BRADL Y INTERNATIONAL AI PORT. The air-control tower, not reassuringly, was swathed in scaffolding.
As we filed into the terminal, the first thing to greet us was a row of Asians seated on the floor under a sign warning us of a twenty-thousand-dollar fine for bringing in the wrong kinds of food. We walked through long, bare corridors, rode escalators, made our way round hallways and along more gray, anonymous passageways, to more escalators (one of the major causes of accidents at airports, for people who’ve never seen moving stairways before). There were no signs of welcome or greeting (though later I would come upon a bland portrait of Mayor Riordan, surrounded by some multicultural children, in Terminal 5), and the faces waiting to welcome us looked almost as disoriented as our own.