At the Gate

At the Gate

At the gate, Gate 13, they still hadn’t changed the sign that said where the next flight was going. It was going to Lubbock, and so was Ronald. He sat facing the sign, rather than looking out the window at the wide Texas sky, because he was getting nervous, and he wanted to see when they changed the sign. The flight was only about a half hour late, and the attendants kept assuring everyone that it would take off as soon as possible. And the flight to Lubbock was leaving out of this gate, as soon as they could board it. But the seconds, the minutes were becoming longer and longer. He could almost no longer bear it.

To his left, a television went on about the presidential race; there were way too many candidates, at this point, and he could barely focus. Occasionally this particular news channel would switch to a bombing or some violence somewhere else in the world. Ronald wasn’t used to television, and its constant blather irritated him as well. Off in the corner of the gate area, a poor mother was trying to control three young children; the youngest, a boy maybe two, was pawing away at a garbage can, while his older sister, about four, argued with her mother about the way she had changed the daughter’s hair. The third child, also a sister, was a bit older, maybe fourteen, and cast a disparaging look at everyone, but didn’t do much about the little boy. The boy’s hand was now reaching into the garbage can, leaning it over, while he climbed on a nearby seat. He was about two or three, very active, perhaps more than the mother could handle. The mother, in her thirties, very pretty but completely exhausted, kept calling the boy and telling him to return, but to no avail. He seemed determined, in his own way; if anything, he was determined to find out what was in that garbage can.

Ronald was a wind energy consultant. His specialty was knowing how various kinds of winds interacted with the various blades of the modern wind generator. He’d gone to Canada to help with a project on the high plains of Saskatchewan, but something had bothered him on the return trip: a man who, for whatever reason, had been allowed to leave Canada, but not allowed to enter the U.S. The man, a good-looking young fellow of indiscriminate national origin, had somehow convinced the Canadian authorities to let him try to enter the U.S., but he didn’t have a backup plan for what to do if rejected, and basically, Canada didn’t want him, once he was rejected. His luck had run out. He was stranded in that nowhere land between customs agents, arguing for what seemed to be an eternity, and it seemed like forever even to Ronald, who at that point was just standing in line. Ronald wasn’t sure how such things worked; what if the guy couldn’t go anywhere else?

Now, at the gate, another young man sat picked a seat next to Ronald and sat down, and started talking to Ronald about various topics: the flight, the delay, the weather.s He was pleasant, well-dressed, about twenty five or so, and had a few lines of worry on his face. As often happens, the conversation somehow drifted to the topic of eternal salvation, and the loving power of this young man’s savior. Ronald noticed at the same time both how likely it was for this to happen, and how thoroughly incapable he was of diverting the topic, or even just shutting it down. He was bored; he was being friendly; it just seemed like a normal conversation at first. Now he was considering bringing up the truth – that he really didn’t believe in heaven, at least not the heaven of everything being good, everyone happy. If there was a heaven, then what was this, purgatory?

Now people got off another flight, coming into the airport, which was in Dallas, and this was a good sign; the flight to Lubbock would be departing soon, probably with that very plane. The flight attendants arrived with their luggage and talked with the man at the ticket counter. Ronald was relieved. Progress was being made. The sign still hadn’t changed, but there was every indication that there would truly be a flight to Lubbock, and Ronald would get home.

The boy had now fallen into the garbage can, head first. It was the kind of garbage can where the hole in the top was smaller than the can itself, so that once he was in it, he couldn’t get out very easily, even when it was tipped over or sideways. His mother had seen it, at the last minute, but she had been unable to prevent it, because it happened quickly. Her anguished shouts upset the boy, and one could hear him crying and shouting out inside the garbage can, though because it was metallic there was an echo and it just raised the general noise and confusion, without solving the problem. The problem, really, was that he had two legs and two arms, and he wouldn’t be still enough for them to remove him, legs first, and they couldn’t seem to take the top off of the can in order to make the process easier. She had help now, as some bystanders saw the problem and came over to help, including someone from the airline. The boy kicked furiously, inside the can, hoping that would make a difference; it made the situation worse. Ronald considered helping, being naturally good at keeping his composure and taking apart things such as garbage cans, but he didn’t; screaming kids made him uncomfortable, especially anywhere near airplanes and confined spaces, and he didn’t want to be any closer to them than he was already.

The young man sitting next to him, dressed up, intent on discussing the joys of heaven, was similarly aloof from the situation with the boy. Ronald again almost blurted out his disagreement with the concept of heaven; he was, after all, a scientist; but instead he asked the young man about the particulars of his flight. He was coming back from Africa, he said, where he was on a mission. But it was more than a mission; he was training African missionaries, so that Africa could have more African missionaries, and they would be more thorough and efficient in covering the world with missionaries.  Ronald, hungry all of a sudden, excused himself and stepped out into the hallway where there was a McDonald’s.

In the hallway of the gate, there was a steady stream of travelers, with suitcases and packs, traveling either way, either toward the lower-numbered gates, toward the SkyTrain, or perhaps toward the bathrooms or the flight information boards. One person with the silver star of the Dallas football team on his dark blue shirt, struggled with a few extra bags. Ronald longed to be back in his office, where he studied computer models of wind flow and the behavior of certain kinds of wind-generation systems in response to variations in the flow. He couldn’t even begin to discuss it with the average airport traveler, so he kept it to himself. But occasionally, lost in a sea of humanity, especially people moving in a hallway such as this, or many people going the same direction in all different speeds, he’d think about his research.

At the McDonald’s, the big question, of course, was whether he could actually get something quickly enough to eat it before, at the gate, they would be boarding. He had now run out of time, and knew that he had to be back at the gate in minutes, perhaps ten or twelve.  At McDonald’s there were three separate lines, each with three or four people, but some man was complaining loudly that he had been given a hamburger with cheese, when he had explicitly said no cheese. McDonald’s workers were scrambling to accommodate him, trying not to lose track of their other orders.

The memory of the guy who was stranded at customs led Ronald to try getting something to eat, no matter how bad or how quickly eaten, and he almost stepped in line. But in the end, he chose against the food; it would be easier, and healthier, to simply wait, and not take the chance of missing a flight. When he got back to the gate, people were lining up. The pressure on the boy to hold still and let himself be removed from the garbage can was intense; finally, they had figured it out, and he got out, bubble gum in his hair. He was telling the airline attendant about the kinds of garbage he had experienced in there, in the darkness, as the grownups around him tried to make him presentable for the flight.

To the side, another airline steward was counseling the older sister of that boy, the one who had cast such disparaging looks at everyone when Ronald had first seen her. This girl, who was about thirteen, had apparently exploded in a rage against her mother, just as Ronald had stepped out of the gate and gone down the hallway. Her face was red, and she was shaking. She was at an age, apparently, when everything around her was faulty, nothing was as it should be. She couldn’t really describe how she had become so angry and exploded, or even how she was feeling now. They tried to restore her composure as well, so that the family could board the plane.

The young man who had sat next to Ronald, the missionary, had now realized that he had lost his cell phone, on some connecting flight; after a good amount of frantic searching, and even asking Ronald if he’d seen it (he hadn’t), he was now alerting the airline attendants to the problem. But it was pretty clear to Ronald, as he watched this, that the airline attendants had better things to do. The young missionary, apparently missing his wife and children, who had given up on Africa and returned to Texas earlier, was now in a panic; he was going to have to go without that phone for a few days, and that was quite a hardship, in the modern era, even if you were a missionary. Ronald noticed that they had changed the sign, and lined up to board the plane, grateful that he was moving on to the next step.

(8-15)