Munich Airport

by Greg Baxter

  The morgue, in Berlin, was in the basement of a hospital. The hospital was an old building and it seemed like a dangerous place to be, a place that would make you sick if you stuck around. Beside every door there were hand sanitizers. You placed your hand below a sensor and a fine puff of alcohol spray came out, and you rubbed it into your hands. Even though I touched almost nothing, I sanitized my hands at every opportunity. I went alone. Trish had offered to come along, but I said I’d prefer to be by myself. There was a coroner and a witness, a police officer. The coroner was a man in his fifties with little glasses, a weak chin, a bad complexion, a lazy eye, and he was bald on top with closely cropped hair on the sides. I found him hard to look at, but not because of his appearance—it was that the place itself had infected him with dreariness. I was given some papers to fill out. I looked them over and said, I can’t understand any of this. They said the paperwork was essential. I’m here to identify my sister, I said, can I call the embassy and get them to help me with the paperwork afterward? The coroner spoke quietly to the officer for a few moments. The coroner was in charge, but I could see that he didn’t want to be. He wanted somebody else to take responsibility for altering the procedure. The officer, who was young, tall, blond-haired, muscular, who wore a stiffly starched uniform, and who wore a sidearm—and who was probably quite inexperienced—refused to accept the responsibility. The coroner finally agreed to let me see the body. He said it would be an unofficial identification. I asked him what that meant—would I have to come again? No, he said, it would be sufficient once the paperwork was completed. I was taken into a room that had a glass window. Through the window I could see another room, which was dark. The officer stood just behind me, ready, I guessed, to catch me if I fainted. The light in the other room came on. It was a blue-green light. The tiles on the wall were blue-green—I suspected they were white, and the light gave them color. The coroner, who wore a face mask and protective glasses, wheeled in a gurney with a body under a blanket. Suddenly I thought I was going to lose my nerve, I was going to be sick, I wasn’t ready, I’d never done anything like this. The coroner stepped away from the gurney and the body and pressed a button on the wall, and his voice came through. The officer then said to me, in English, Shall we proceed? Yes, I said, please proceed. The officer pressed a button on our side of the glass and told the coroner to proceed. The coroner pulled the blanket down to just below Miriam’s neck. He held the blanket and did not step away. I nodded and he immediately pulled the blanket back over her head. I turned around. The officer, who was averting his gaze, said, Okay? Okay, I said. I really needed to be alone, but I had to sit in an office and meet the coroner again, and then I called Trish and she got the paperwork faxed to her for me to complete later. And then I went outside and, for no reason I know, hopped on a bus that looked empty and sat in the back and rubbed my eyes. She had almost no hair. Miriam’s head was almost hairless. Her head seemed shrunken, and this made her nose seem gigantic. Her ears, too, looked oversized. The light in the room prevented me from seeing the color of her skin, but the texture was claylike, striated, and stretched. Her cheeks were pulled back in a way that gave her a ghoulish smile. If I had not seen her five years ago, when she was already painfully thin, I would not have recognized her. Actually, I didn’t recognize her right away. But I finally recognized something in her closed eyes, an expression quite at odds with the torment that had expressed itself all over her face and head and neck. I think I saw surprise, surprise without fear. Or else I have been gradually altering the memory ever since, possibly to make the image easier to bear, as I carry it forth forever, or possibly to extend to her a reward for her courage, to decorate her troubled memory with a millionth of a millionth of a second of grace.

  Outside the bathroom, Trish is waiting with our carry-ons. She is facing away from the entrance, looking toward the windows behind where we were sitting, past the history exhibit—staring at the tarmac, or the brightness, or the city hidden in the distance, or the mountains far beyond the city. I get her attention. I put my sunglasses back on. I grab my carry-on and my father’s carry-on and start to walk. She walks beside me. She knows what we need to do—she saw the floor in the bathroom—but we don’t need to speak of it. I go a little faster than my normal pace, and she keeps up. I tell her I can’t believe how much farther we have to travel today.

  Will your dad be okay? Can he make the trip?

  He’ll make it. I’m not sure if he’ll survive the flight, but he’s getting on that plane.

  We are moving fast and I tell Trish I need to slow down. I feel sick, my head is spinning. Trish asks me if I’m going to be okay. I ask her if I look green again and she says no, I look translucent. I am sweating but I am ice-cold. I think my glands are swelling up. I have a headache in my teeth and jaw. I feel fine, I say, I feel like a million dollars. We stop at a departures board and check for Atlanta. Our flight is scheduled, at last. There it is—Go to Gate. Trish checks the time on her phone. I check the time as well. Considering all that lies ahead of us, we do not have a lot of time.

  Though I cannot speak for my father, it was easy for me, in the beginning, not to eat. For the first forty-eight hours after our return from Aachen, I simply had no appetite. We went out drinking that first night, and I felt nauseous until I had quite a few drinks, and on the way home I thought about getting a kebab or a pizza slice, but I didn’t, because I knew I wouldn’t keep it down. That was when we met the man sitting on the curb and sang him Happy Birthday. He was English. I’ve lost me mates, he said. He didn’t know what hotel he was staying in. He didn’t know where he was. But he wasn’t too worried. And after we sang to him, he cheered up and decided to go find a bar he could drink in all night. I think we hugged him. I can’t remember how old he was. He was probably twenty-one. I think he tried to convince us to come along with him, but we were absolutely finished. I hadn’t been drunk on consecutive nights for many years, and suddenly I found myself hanging on to life at the end of a nine-day binge. When I woke the next day, I felt truly terrible. I felt as though my insides had liquefied. I couldn’t get back to sleep. I was wide awake but unbearably tired. I got up, showered, and went to sit on the couch. My father was up, too. Neither of us was in the mood for breakfast, or even coffee, and we didn’t have the energy to speak. It was too cold to sit outside on the terrace. It was obvious that a period of pure waiting had begun—and apart from one last trip to Miriam’s apartment, and a night out with Otis and Miriam’s friends, that was what I did. I waited. I walked around and listened to music. I cycled. I stood outside cafés. I sat on benches. And as my appetite slowly returned, I staved off hunger pangs. Perhaps, if I had been in London, I’d have started eating sandwiches. In London, I might not have made it through that second day, and there never would have been a question of deciding not to eat. But in Berlin, they have no sandwiches. They have these things that are like sandwiches, but they are not sandwiches—the bread is wrong. And the only thing I could have eaten at that point were sandwiches—bland, familiar, prepared sandwiches from supermarkets or sandwich shops. I sat on the couch, checked the time, then stared out the window at the sleet, or just the gray, and thought of how far away London seemed to be, how unreachable, as though I would have to travel back in time to get there. Everything in my life would instantly dematerialize if I were dead. All my possessions would vanish. All my notes would be erased. All my debts would drift away. My remains would become nothing more than impediments to others—banks, bosses, an incoming tenant. But I did not have to die. I could just go live at home. I could work with my hands, I thought, renovate houses, lay roof, learn to drive a backhoe, find work shoveling on a horse ranch, buy a tiny fishing boat, meet a woman twice divorced.

  When the hunger pangs started, and the sweats and nausea were strong, and I couldn’t stop the trembling, I found that exercise could take my mind off it. I did push-ups and sit-ups, or laps around the huge rooftop terrace in the freezing wind and rain. I hopped on my bike and rode u
p and down hills, crossed intersections, raced cars, hurried everywhere. And when I stopped, it felt, sometimes, as though I had eaten. I also thought of food, I placed before my mind’s eye huge platters of food, delicious food, expensive food, and I let myself dream of eating it, digging flesh out of lobster claws, eating two-inch-thick rare steaks, sucking the last bits of meat and skin off a whole hen. This was effective but it felt dishonest. It made me feel I was discrediting the whole experience, and Miriam’s experience along with it. So I started to refuse to let myself think of food. If I found myself thinking of food, I immediately forced myself to think of Miriam’s body, lying in the morgue. After that, I found that brushing my teeth averted hunger. I went and bought some German toothpaste that tasted a little like bleach, and for a while I was brushing my teeth every thirty minutes. When I began to realize that I was swallowing and eating the toothpaste, I quit that, too. And all there was left was to see it through, to face the desire to eat and refuse, to reject the body’s need for sustenance. I’d go to my en suite and lie on the floor and convulse and pull my ears out and pull my hair and scratch my face and throw myself over the toilet when I couldn’t vomit anything up, and during these convulsions I could see clearly and objectively that to save myself from this pain was hedonism, that everything above this pain was extravagance. And the greatest thing about this pain was that while it was happening you could feel yourself disappearing, cell by cell, breaking down and getting thinner. Then the convulsions would end and I would lie there and think of Miriam and how much she must have hated us, or the pity we wanted so badly to proffer her, in order to go through this. Our faith that she would one day need us again, just as we needed her, no doubt belonged to the hedonism and extravagance and stupidity of life above the pain of starving. I started to eat little bits of bread because the convulsions and attacks were getting more severe. Every time I had a piece of bread, even a bite, I would go and look in the mirror, and I saw I had fattened dramatically, that I was carrying so much useless and unclean weight. And until I was hungry again—until I knew I was suppressing my body’s distress—I saw and felt myself fattening. Whenever I thought of returning to London, I felt myself fattening—expanding with habits, ideas, opinions, things—and it seemed to me that my work was not just keeping me in circumstances that allowed for and required this expansion but it was a plague, an incurable and inescapable plague of superabundance and anxiety. I was so preoccupied with my own struggle that it took a couple of days to realize that my father hadn’t been eating, either. He looked tired, emotionless. He said he couldn’t get warm, even though we had the heat up as high as it would go in our apartment. He would suddenly sit down and complain about blindness, numbness in his hands and feet, and now and then, if the seat were comfortable enough, he’d fall asleep for thirty seconds. I thought our trip had exhausted him, and the reality that Miriam would be released soon, and that our time here, and his time with Trish, would be over, was sinking in. Then he started vomiting, or at least heaving, in the bathroom of our apartment.

  Trish and I stop first at a men’s casual clothing store. I need socks, I say. I lift up my trouser legs to show her my bare ankles, and I say, Don’t ask. What does your dad need? she asks. Everything, I say. She says, You get the pants and whatever else, I’ll get a shirt. I say, I’ve got a better idea, you run across to the shoe store and grab him some shoes. Perfect, she says, and she walks out of the clothing store. I watch her. She gets about twenty feet away, stops, turns around and jogs back. What size would you say? she asks. I say, No idea, I’m a twelve, that’s probably a safe size to get. Okay, she says, and she walks out again. Sizing his clothes is much easier. We’re the same height, and though he is thinner around the neck and waist, along the arms and legs—he has the frame of a slim, elderly man—we have similar proportions. I get him a white T-shirt with an ocean scene with a surfer and some writing on it. I get him a soft, blue, thick button-down long-sleeve shirt to wear over the T-shirt, and I get him a navy-blue hooded sweatshirt. It has a design on the back, some writing and a cityscape, but it’s for warmth and comfort on the flight. I also get him a pair of jeans, thirty-two waist, thirty-four inseam, some boxer shorts, and a pair of socks—I get a pair of socks for myself, too. At the counter, as the woman is ringing everything up, I look down at what I’m wearing—the ragged suit jacket with sweaty armpits, the shirt that is soaked through with sweat almost everywhere, and which stinks of boozy, nicotine-y perspiration. I go back and get myself a gray hooded sweatshirt with a black scorpion on it for the flight as well. The cost of it all is just under five hundred euro. I don’t even try to pretend to not be shocked. I tell the woman behind the counter, That is ridiculous, it’s mercenary. She doesn’t know how to respond. Do I refuse to pay? she wonders. She cannot see my eyes behind the sunglasses, but I am trying to express my sense of futility through them. What can be done about airport prices? I want to ask. I pull my wallet out. How much is the sweatshirt? I ask. She shows me the price tag. It’s eighty-nine euro. Then I see that the jeans are a hundred and fifty. I feel outraged, but I shouldn’t be. London is more expensive, and it’s actually my job to help make affordable things expensive, mostly by redefining, or reverse-defining, unaffordable. I give her my business credit card. I have a twenty-thousand-pound limit on that card, but every month the bank direct-debits the full amount I owe. When I got the card, I said, Not much of a credit card, is it? He said something about responsible business habits—this was a time when people took advice from bankers—and I said it didn’t matter anyway, my business didn’t require a lot of credit. I never had to go back and ask for an upgrade. I pay myself a decent salary. I try to expense everything I can—even a portion of my rent, and some of my utilities, and any travel. I pay myself a bonus at the end of each year with whatever I have left—in order to avoid corporate tax. I pay my accountant. And I start over. Every couple of years I take any savings I’ve accumulated and put them into stocks and mutual funds in the US.

  I get everything in a big bag and walk out. I don’t immediately see a shoe store. The nausea and fatigue I’ve felt since leaving my father in the bathroom becomes a sudden and unbearable light-headedness. My legs become almost too heavy to move. I am numb. I find a chair—there is finally some emptiness in the airport. I sit down and put the bag between my legs and think that I must take my phone out to text Trish my whereabouts. But I cannot pick up my phone. The exhaustion is like nothing I’ve experienced. I have a moment of dream thought, a dream I’m conscious of having. My father and I are digging with shovels. The ground is frozen. Then I feel someone poking my shoulder and it’s Trish. I open my eyes and realize my head is all the way back, without any support. I nearly give myself whiplash trying to lift my head. I sit up and cough. I try to speak but my throat is dry. Trish asks, anxiously, if we should go. I don’t want to admit that I cannot move. I try to speak but I can’t make any sense. I make the kind of noises one makes with a jaw full of novocaine. I shake my head. I clear my throat a few times and I can speak again. I say, Just give me one minute. She sits down beside me and I lean forward. I put my elbows on my knees and my eyes on the cups of my palms. Then I scratch my head for a while. I wiggle my toes and fingers.

  I realize she has a large bag, even bigger than the bag I have. I say, Did you get my dad cowboy boots or something? She opens the bag and inside are three boxes. She says, I just didn’t want to get him the wrong size. I didn’t want to think of him walking across the airport in Atlanta with shoes that made his feet hurt. She opens one of the boxes. They are soft-leather penny loafers. My dad wears penny loafers, she says, he swears there is nothing more comfortable.

  I look down into the bag and see two other boxes.

  I got them in three sizes, she says.

  That is pretty thoughtful of you, I say.

  Let’s go, she says.

  I must have watched my father walk around a lot in penny loafers, sockless, watering the grass, gardening, waterproofing the deck, wandering th
rough the maze of our house, washing the car, getting the paper or checking the mailbox, going to the grocery store, grilling steaks, standing on sidelines while I or Miriam played sports. I remember my father falling from a tree he was cutting. He’d been swarmed by bees. He screamed at us all to get inside and somehow picked himself up after the fall and ran around trying to wave the bees away from his face until he finally jumped the fence into the backyard and dove into the pool. I remember my mother swimming in the pool, drinking iced tea, or, if her friends were over, drinking gin and tonics, and either my father was there or he was absent—but the memory is curiously not of my mother but of where my father might have stood or not stood. One day, when a lot of friends were over, my mother broke her leg while running around the pool. The bone came clear out of her skin. My father was in California, so the neighbors gathered around her and waited for the ambulance to come. When my mother came back from the hospital, she wore a cast from her toes to her hips, and a big gurney came with her, which was adjustable, so she could raise her legs or her back. She was in that gurney for a month, and in the cast for longer. My grandmother did all the cooking. Miriam and I did the housework. My grandmother, when she drove us around the quiet streets of our neighborhood, let Miriam and me stand on top of the car and pretend to be surfing. Once, Miriam fell and broke her arm. Our grandmother was terrified and thought she would end up in jail. She was also terrified of how my father would respond. He was in California and he wouldn’t be home for weeks, so my mother decided not to tell him. We all decided, together, that my father would never forgive such recklessness. Even if my mother had tried to take the blame, as she first decided she would do, we all knew my father would know she was lying, and then he would not forgive her deceit. About six months later it came out—it was always going to, I guess—when my father was home for the summer, and he laughed and laughed at our decision to keep it from him—had he inspired such fear in all of us? And we all thought we had escaped retribution until, later, my father quietly took our grandmother away for a talk, and she was—though it sounds slightly overtheatrical to say it—never the same with us again. And I do, now, remember beating up some kids over Miriam. I was a big kid. Miriam was quiet. I remember once hearing that two boys had taken Miriam to the woods. I ran after them. I found them trying to lock her in a shed, or some kind of abandoned house, in the middle of the woods. The woods I speak of—dense pine forests near the Gulf—are dark and endless, they are useless for timber, they are overgrown, they are full of snakes, they are not places you go to for nature and reflection. Everywhere, slim pine trunks rise up to the high green needles that darken the sunlight. There is just enough room to walk between these trees, and at dusk, the shadows that move through them as you walk seem like bodies darting from tree trunk to tree trunk. The ground is nothing but fallen needles, reddened, dry on the top, wet and compacted down below. If you happen to come across a little trail, or a dirt track made of two parallel ruts—made by tires—it usually leads to a natural break in the woods, a pond—dried or not—a clearing, a creek bed, and so on, and generally you find a structure there, a shed or a house that nobody lives in. Miriam was nine or ten, I guess, when she was dragged out there by two boys. It was something that was happening in our town. Boys my age were taking girls Miriam’s age out to these places and locking them in these sheds or threatening to lock them in. It was like a game. It’s hard to believe, now, that anybody would do such a thing, even the redneck boys in our town. Some of the girls were lucky—they weren’t locked inside. Others, like Miriam, weren’t as lucky. But I think that maybe none of the girls was as scared as Miriam. I remember I found out about what was happening to Miriam from some girls who were laughing about it, and who claimed that they had been taken, it was okay. But Miriam wasn’t like these people. So I ran into the woods. I knew the woods very well, and I knew where the boys would take her. I could hear her crying out from a long way off. I couldn’t run fast because of the trees, I couldn’t run in a straight line. I was also slowed by the ground, because it was, in places, so soft that my feet sank, and the needles were up to my knees. I finally got there. One boy ran off but I grabbed the other one. I let Miriam out. She couldn’t breathe. I have still never seen, in my life, a face as terrified as her face. She thought she was covered in spiders, I never had the chance to check. She ran away. She didn’t go straight home. She just walked the streets for hours—I had to get on my bike and go find her. I beat the kid up. I didn’t want to hurt him so much that he’d go looking for revenge, come back and take that revenge out on Miriam. But I had to do something. I had to teach him a lesson. Now that I am here in this airport I think I probably should have killed him. What would have happened if I hadn’t come? How long would they have kept her in there? Another minute? An hour? And what might they have done to her when they released her, when they—these two stupid, violent boys—realized they had the power to so thoroughly torment and dominate somebody? A few days after that, I went into the woods by myself, I walked the path those boys would have led Miriam. I went slowly. I looked up at the canopy above. I tried to think of everything as Miriam had thought of it—of how different the light in the treetops might have seemed to her, of how strange her own senses might have seemed to her—I tried to emulate her panic in my senses, to smell and hear nothing, to feel nothing, while all her energies were channeled into the strength to fight or escape, which was not enough strength. They had opened the door somehow and pushed her in, and when I arrived they were holding the door and laughing. That first boy saw me and ran. The second looked at me and his look said, Well, you found us, no harm done, though. So I gave him a bloody nose and I choked him and I kicked him in the head and ribs. When I went back, I saw that nobody had come to repair the lock on the door, so I opened it. I was sick with fear. I couldn’t see much. There wasn’t any furniture. There was some wood, a lot of cut logs. There weren’t any windows. The shed was like every structure you find in places like that—a cheap wooden frame held together by screws, brackets, and sometimes nails, covered with hand-cut, possibly secondhand, siding. The air inside was hot and stale. I went in and turned around and looked out at what Miriam would have seen last, before the door closed, except for the faces of the two boys trying to close the door on her, their eyes and fingers. Then I closed the door on myself and stood in the darkness for as long as possible. I might have lasted thirty seconds or a minute, but I knew I could escape whenever I wanted, I simply had to push the door open. But when I did push, the bottom edge of the door of the shed got slightly stuck in the earth, just a little—but it was enough to fill my thoughts with dread—and instead of lifting the door to make it open easier, I lunged at the door, shoulder first, with all my might, and tumbled out into the woods again. I found two big spiders on me. One on my shirt and one on my jeans. I figured I was covered by hundreds, so I undressed, as fast as I could, throwing my clothes on the little dirt road that led from the shed back to whatever country road you came to a mile or so later and stomped on my clothes and whipped them in the air. I rubbed my head and danced on the little dirt road. Then I went home.