“Why are you this? A security agent?” he asked.
I told him what had happened to my family. And then how I had felt, walking through an airport. I wanted to wear that uniform and stand at the security gates; I wanted to feel how it would feel to be the gatekeeper, to decide whether or not it was safe to allow them to walk through the scanner, to shepherd them safely to their planes.
At work, the last few weeks, I had been holding everything in, every nuance of feeling. Now John Comet was sitting here, completely innocent, and I wanted to unload everything onto him. His hand reached up and smoothed his light brown hair from his face. With purpose. A blameless gesture.
“So that’s what I’ve been doing,” I said. “For three years.”
“Well,” he said. “I see.”
We were not exactly great conversationalists. The silver sugar canisters glowed in the sun.
“How did you get into custom luggage?” I asked.
“I’m in marketing,” he said, leaning forward slightly. “This company hired me and said, what do people really want to take with them when they’re going somewhere? Some people bring lots of, you know, toiletries, other people say screw that, I just need my tennis shoes. We aim to please everyone. We give people ways to carry things. Anything.”
He spread more butter on his muffin, vigorously.
“My wife didn’t like luggage,” he said.
“Your wife?” I asked.
“Ex. She took one bag when she moved out. With our son. Louis. She left all his stuff. His toys, his Pokémon cards, etc. I knew he’d want it. I had to bring it to him.”
“When did she move out?” I asked.
“Two years ago. And a month. She’s waiting tables in Miami. Married a new guy. Louis is in third grade.”
His voice was coarser than I had expected. He had a slight accent, maybe New Jersey. He stirred some sugar into his coffee, gently, and then a bit harder.
“So,” he said, his voice softer, “I tell my customers you need lots of pockets.”
We talked about nothing. How I grew roses on the deck of my apartment. A few of them, yellow and pink and cream, their fancy faces turned toward the sun. He owned rare beetles, a unique specimen that was usually found in Brazil. His voice became soft, wistful as he told me about them. “I was on a tour when I saw one. Sitting on a leaf. It had green, purple wings that looked like glass. It looked like it had come from another galaxy. But here it was. I wanted it. I had never wanted anything like that. I wasn’t supposed to bring it back. But I did. I have four of them. They live in a custom-made cage by the refrigerator. They eat lettuce and carrot shreds.” He whispered so that his words felt like a treasure bestowed on me.
We ordered more from the menu, from the breakfast side, bacon and French toast and scrambled eggs, and the dinner side, pot roast and fettuccini Alfredo and steamed broccoli. There was nothing so special about him; he was just a luggage salesman, not even really a handsome one. He wanted to be caught. He tried to conceal nothing. His face was just his face. I knew that he could see everything in mine, the raw haggardness of wanting. I did not feel like a security agent. When his hand reached for mine, it made me feel like god.
THE NEXT DAY, I TRIED TO LOOK PAST THEM ALL, TOWARD THE LINES of passengers, toward John Comet. I saw him again and again, coming toward me, but it was not him; there were hundreds of not hims, marching toward their destinations. They walked, clutching their briefcases, their faces damp, to New York, Philadelphia, Boise, Las Vegas, a crowd of people to be questioned, searched, waved on, or detained. My heart was a hook; it was reaching toward John Comet.
He came along, finally, dragging another piece of luggage with many compartments. He seemed to be a candle, glowing through the airport’s blue dimness, though his incandescence was invisible to everyone but me.
WE MET IN THE SAME COFFEE SHOP AGAIN A FEW DAYS LATER. HIS presence before me as a regular human was startling and almost disappointing; it was as though he were a ventriloquist for the John Comet I saw, glowing, in my mind. We ordered what he had before, and also Jell-O and a salad of beets.
He told me about his son. “Halloween,” said John Comet. “I’ve never been able to take him around for Halloween.”
“Why not?”
“His mother makes up stories about me.”
I took note of his face. It was not the face of a liar; a liar’s face was speeded up. His face was still, which was hard to do if you were pressing something down.
“What sort of stories?”
“Oh, like I didn’t watch him. He ran into the street.”
“Did he?” I asked.
“No!” he said. He said it so sharply I believed he was honest. “Not when I was there.”
I leaned forward, watching; I understood that he wanted to spend time with me partly because he wanted to be judged.
“Why did she say this about you?” I asked.
“She wanted to get away,” he said. “She loved someone else.”
He clasped his hands. He was sitting there like a cup of coffee. Looking at him, his square face, his dark eyes, his salesmanishness, you couldn’t tell he was someone who had slid off the surface of his family into nothing.
We left the coffee shop. This time we drove to his apartment. It wasn’t what I expected, but was a worn-out, motel-like place, with stucco walls and a red rippled roof. At the door of his apartment, we started to kiss. He tasted dark and sour, of coffee and salt, and I wanted to follow that taste into the rest of him. His fingers held onto my shoulders. I had never noticed everything this way. The lights from the streetlights were long, radiant bars.
Then his body rustled, and he stepped away from me.
“They’re awake,” he said.
The window was open. Inside his apartment, right beside the window, was a large wire cage. It held four beetles. Their shells resembled glass, purple and green and iridescent, the colors so deep everything around them was shameful, blanched. The beetles were almost braggy in their gratuitous loveliness. We stood, faces almost touching, as the beetles made their way across the limp shredded lettuce with their fragile black legs.
“Let’s go inside,” I said.
I felt his breath on my ear, his body pressed against mine. I longed for him so much my fingertips hurt. John Comet paused. “Not now,” he said.
“Why not?”
“They’re eating. We can watch them from here.”
I wanted to go in now. I wanted to touch those shells that resembled glass but weren’t. But mostly, I wanted John Comet. I wanted to press our bodies together, run my hands along his arms, his chest, walk through him like a door to my salvation. Instead, we stood for a long time, looking at those beetles, gleaming.
THE NEXT DAY, I WAS STATIONED AT THE END OF THE BIN CONVEYOR. I was the last person passengers would encounter before going onto their flight. Lester came up to me.
“You’re on questioning today, Sally,” said Lester, brightly.
“Yes sir,” I said. Lester had taken to carrying around clipboards, taking absurdly copious notes. If I slipped up, the decision would be easy.
I was, in my porous state of longing and fear, highly effective. I found items of interest: a Swiss army knife, art deco scissors, a package of firecrackers.
And here was John Comet, pulling along his luggage. His face set in its same expression. He was off today to Philadelphia. No sign of what we had done the night before, or what we hadn’t. He stood in the body scanner, arms lifted as the machine whirred. He was highlighted under his right arm.
“He needs a patdown,” said Deanne, looking around. “Is there a man available?”
There was not.
John Comet looked at me, his face blank as milk. “She can do it,” he said.
Deanne looked at me with eyebrows raised, like, Do you want to touch this weirdo?
I stood very still.
“You good with this, Sally?”
“I’m a team player,” I said, crisply.
We went in a corner.
“Lift your arms, sir,” I said.
He raised them into a T. I could search him however I wanted. I began to slide my hands down his arm. His arm was surprisingly taut and thin in the airport light, as I pressed down the sides for any metal objects. He stared straight ahead, at nothing.
“Done?” he asked.
“Not yet, “ I said.
I squeezed the other arm. Sometimes people set off the machine for no reason. A slight move, a radiance, a ghostly threat only the machine could see. I stood, official, wearing my uniform, but I did not want to let go of his arm.
He let out a breath. Of love? Desire? Annoyance? Did he just want to get on with his day? I lifted my hand off his jacket. Slowly. A fingertip, a palm, the thin material of his suit. Each moment was sorrowful, releasing him. I missed each inch, each cell slowly. Slowly. I let go. Then I stepped back, back into the world of only me.
“All clear,” I said. “You may proceed to your destination.”
His eyelids fluttered. I didn’t know what that meant. He nodded at me, and smiled, a beautiful smile, and took hold of his luggage and walked onto his gate, and I stood in the light, as he went away.
JOHN COMET CALLED ME TWO NIGHTS LATER. HE HAD JUST GOTTEN off his plane. He wanted to see me. Now.
We met in the diner. He wasn’t hungry. He wanted to walk out of the diner into a park. He had the worn, dazed presence of someone who’d crossed a time zone—something had been lost. His hair was damp and sticky. His body had the stale smell of airplane air.
He pressed his mouth to mine the moment we walked into the park. The park black, the grass glistening under the grayish fluorescent lamplight. He kissed me hard, slowly, as though trying to inhale some important element inside of me. Gold. We fell together onto the grass. We were velvet and water and arms and lips, and we were no one, and that was what we wanted, to climb into another person and stretch out into their lovely darkness. To believe another could make room for you, could perhaps keep you safe. That had to be the answer, for I did not want to contain only myself, my rotten sadness. His arms were thin and steely, and the earth was hard and damp under us. We were alive, weren’t we? Didn’t this prove we were alive?
Suddenly, he rolled away. I lay, breathless, beside him.
“I saw my son,” he said.
“Good,” I said. Now, on with it. He stretched beside me, a bar of candy.
“From the street. He ran toward me, and then he was mad.”
“Why?”
“He said I missed all his baseball games.”
He stood up against the starry streetlights.
“I wanted to go,” he said. “How could I convince him? She didn’t tell me about them. She wanted Raymond to go with her. The asshole. Not me.”
He began pacing, as though he wanted to run now, to some other future, as though he could not bear this moment where we were housed.
“Maybe you did something,” I said, a little irritably. “Think for a minute. Maybe you did.”
He stopped and looked at the sky. His face held one feeling. He was distraught. He loved his son, I could tell that. “What?” he said. “Can someone tell me?”
I thought of my parents, leaving the house for the opera. I thought of the last time I had seen them alive. I thought of every gesture they made, one after another, each one leading to the final disaster. Or was each one random? What did any single action mean? I watched them put on their coats, my father’s black wool coat full of holes, changing it for a brown one he didn’t really like, my mother walking around, always ready to leave before he was, and looking at my sister and me and saying, “I have to stop to get something to eat.”
I looked at John Comet, standing there. The earth like a cracker under his feet.
“I can’t tell you anything,” I said. “You can kiss me now.”
I stood up and grabbed his shoulders. I could feel his breath on my face; I wanted to taste it. He took my hand, and we walked out of the park to my car.
He stared at me; his face was utterly familiar to me. Fear.
“Oh,” he said.
We stood, examining each other. He did not move.
“I,” he said. It was a breath, a softness—I. I what? I want to? I don’t want to? I am afraid? I can’t? There was an expanse of air between us. What was the purpose of this? Love? My skin was as thin as silk; it barely contained me. He rubbed his hands over his face and stepped back. I stood perfectly still as he walked away from me.
THE NEXT DAY, WE WERE ON ORANGE ALERT. THE PASSENGERS WERE quiet, obedient during orange, looking at us with a damp-eyed gratitude that we would protect their little beating hearts.
Lester stood, looking official, perhaps knowing already who would go. The rest of us didn’t. I stood with good posture in my uniform. I tried to imagine what I could do to convince him that I should stay. The others schemed in a similar fashion. Everyone was very polite, as though their old selves never existed, as though none of us had ever met.
“Can you pass me some new gloves? I do appreciate it.”
“I’m happy to do X-ray till noon if that would help you out.”
The best manners. Smiling. Who the hell were they? Clouds rolled across the airport, filling the runway with mist. Flights were landing, unloading their passengers back to earth. I saw the passengers, feet just touching the ground, rush out, to their loved ones, that most earnest of gestures; I did not know how I would be part of that eager, massing crowd.
Lester was walking around, looking at his clipboard. He walked over to me.
“Sally,” he said. “Can I talk to you for a sec?”
A sec.
We walked over to a corner.
“Well,” he said. He coughed.
I waited. One sec. Then two. My hands froze.
“It’s you,” he said. He coughed again.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m 90 percent sure. I can tell you end of day. You do a good job. I don’t know why anything happens.”
What am I? I thought.
“End of day, I’ll give you the final answer.” He coughed again and walked away.
I walked out from behind the screen. I noticed the others watching me. I did not know what else to do. I went to my post.
John Comet. I could not stop thinking of him. On the grass in the park the night before. It was better to put my mind there, the wet muscular darkness, our breath, to be somewhere other than here.
And then there he was. His luggage rolling behind him. A different suitcase today, one I had never seen. Many compartments.
I tried to look professional, for the last time.
“May I see your ID?”
“Certainly.”
He smiled, his beautiful bright smile. It made me ache to see it.
“Where are you going?”
“Today, Philadelphia.”
“For what purpose?”
He took a breath. “Not sure.”
“Sir,” I said. “For what purpose?”
He looked at me. He blinked.
“Family,” he said.
I handed him his driver’s license.
“Proceed,” I said.
So he walked on. Barefoot by the conveyor. Trudging on to somewhere. His innocence was illustrious and galling. My whole body was a question mark. About the mechanics of everything in the world.
Lester was looking at us. I followed his gaze. He was watching John Comet, who was standing, like anyone, while his luggage went through the X-ray machine. The lines were slow today, people somber, trembling. Everyone thought everyone else would blow things up.
And now Lester was standing. He was walking toward the X-ray machine. He was putting his hand on John Comet’s shoulder.
“Sir, can you step here for a moment? We want to take a look at your bag,” Lester said.
John Comet’s face was white. “Why?” he asked.
“Sir, we’re on orange alert,” said Lester.
John Comet walked with Lester to a corner. I stood at my podium. I could see Lester start to unzip the bag. There were many compartments on the outside to unzip. One. Nothing. Two. Nothing. John Comet stepped forward. Three. Lester lifted a baggie full of lettuce and examined it. John Comet shook his head. Lester opened the baggies and sniffed the lettuce. He opened the main suitcase and lifted the lid. John Comet stepped forward and held his hand over the suitcase, as though to warm his palms.
“What the hell?” Lester said.
The beetles were inside the suitcase. I could see them, the four large ones, their shimmering shells, the almost dainty way they made their way across the suitcase. There were not just four. There were more, there were smaller ones, dozens, all of them moving like a shimmering square of purple/green silk. The other passengers stopped as they walked by. There were gasps. Some of the beetles started to crawl out of the suitcase, gliding green jewels. They were beautiful in their gaudiness, their pure beetle-ness, but others didn’t think so. A woman shrieked. Lester slammed down the lid.
“Agriculture!” called Lester. “For God’s sake. Get them on the phone.”
A man placed his ID on the podium. I did not take it.
“Miss?” the passenger said, annoyed. “I have a flight to catch.”
I looked at him. I stepped away from the podium, leaving the passenger standing, boarding pass in his hand. I was running. “No,” I shouted. The word pierced the air; no one was supposed to shout here. I wanted to shout more. John Comet was looking around the security area. His eyes were burning, and his face reddened; now it was all over, for he looked as though he were going to burst. Lester. He was going to remove him, in a moment, he was going to apprehend his luggage, take the beetles, charge John Comet with god knows what. John Comet was looking for me. I knew this.
I thought of my parents just then, how they rushed through the door to the car that night; I thought of John Comet, standing, collar limp with heat, on a sidewalk in Miami, watching his son from across the street. I thought of how I did not know how I would be able to walk out of this airport now, how I would go on to the next thing.
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