The Parallel Universe of Airports

“Can I buy you a drink?” spoke a hesitant, genial voice to my left. He had a distinct Kiwi accent.

I tore my gaze away from the shiny bar that beckoned to me from a tantalizing few feet away. It bore a certain glitziness that felt put on, but whatever it was doing was working for it. The gentleman who spoke was a handful of plastic seats away. He was short in stature, of retirement age, silver-haired, bespectacled, and kind-eyed. His hands had a slight tremor.

Normally, my womanly warning system – honed to a sharp awareness in my teens and early twenties – would have tapped me on the shoulder in a tired, routine sort of way. But he was a nice older gentleman, and we had crossed paths in an airport, of all places.

And heck, why do I have to be on high, responsible alert all of the time? I yearned for a reprieve. Still, I assessed the surroundings – the constant flow of tired, anonymous humans, screaming children, the odd small, yipping dog from inside a crate, the repetitive jingle from the store selling knick-knacks behind us, and deemed it safe enough, for goodness sake.

Besides, I had been staring longingly at the bar for three hours now, like a dog, in a state of exhaustion that was beyond exhaustion. The man had clearly noticed my air of long-suffering desperation.

So I smiled at him, and said I would love one. An odd little chance encounter, here in a space between worlds.

We chuckled over our shared situation, humped our carry-on luggage over to this nameless, clinically clean alcohol oasis and took our seats at two high stools. He recommended a certain crisp, New Zealand white wine, and ordered a couple of glasses.

I was twenty four, and had just flown across the Pacific for the past sixteen hours to land in Sydney airport, after being waylaid in Vancouver for eight hours due to a wet blizzard that had rendered every vehicle incapable of movement.

That situation seemed impossibly far away now – December in Australia is the height of summer. Heat waves rippled violently along the tarmac outside. The airport workers here were not wrapped in scarves and parkas, but tanned, burnished, and glistening in the apparently unrelenting heat outside.

Meanwhile, I, a horrifically pale Canadian resurfacing from the darkest, coldest days of the year, watched them from the safety of the air conditioning that permeated this space. I wondered distantly what Australia smelled like. I guess I would never know, or at least not today. I was here, but I wasn’t really here, as I was shuffled inefficiently from airborne metal tube, to insulated interior, to airborne metal tube.

Paul, as he introduced himself now, had met me in an interesting predicament. I was a poor student who had chosen frugality over convenience when I chose my flights. Knowing I would spend a long spell in the Sydney airport before making my final sprint to Christchurch, I had packed a handful of Australian dollars with me to tide me over. Those had long since been used up on an extremely expensive McDonald’s value meal, and I was resistant to pay the fees I would have to shoulder to take out more cash.

As Paul and I whiled away first just an hour, and then more, shuffling uncomfortably in our metal seats, it struck me that an airport is a truly liminal space – one built not to look at too closely, but to pass through on your way to somewhere else. After this many hours of air travel, It felt as though we were the only things moving in a world that was happy to stay put. It was equally possible that we were paused, and everything else in the world was moving forward as usual.

People arrived at the bar beside us, ordered drinks, finished them, and left. The more I examined this bar, the more it felt like a stage set. Flight after flight was announced in the same liquid cool voice. The sun rose to its peak and eventually began to set. Our bartender’s shift ended and he was seamlessly replaced by another.

Within the first half hour, Paul knew that I was studying English and he admitted to me that he had certain romantic notions of writing a book in the coming years. I learned that he was recently a surgeon who specialized in mending the small bones and other anatomical bits in people’s hands. He was retired now, he said, holding up his own trembling hands as an explanation. We discovered that we were on the same flight to Christchurch, but tragically sitting at opposite ends of the plane – he being a retired surgeon and I being an English student.

One glass later we shared a private laugh, weighted with true sympathy, at the expense of a bewildered American man who had fallen deeply asleep on a plastic chair, despite the irritating, sharp-edged armrests digging into his body. The poor guy had missed his flight an hour ago and was apologizing to his wife over the phone.

“Do you feel like we’re in the twilight zone?” asked Paul at some point during the second hour. It was probably because the bar’s limited playlist had started over again for the third time. We raised our wine in cheers to that question, and lapsed into a companionable silence.

Someone had left a deck of cards on the bar, so Paul and I played games with them for a while. “Imagine all the important things people are doing right now,” I said to him, dealing out another hand. It wasn’t very funny, but, due to the three glasses of wine he had consumed, Paul almost fell off his stool.

Later he grew serious and told me about how, in his younger years, he traveled to developing countries to assist in hand surgeries to repair damage caused mainly by agricultural and manufacturing accidents – injuries that could affect someone’s ability to earn income for the rest of their lives. When he flew into and out of those countries, he said, he always pictured someone below, gazing at his plane as it flew overhead, reflecting the sun. How far apart they were in every sense of the word.

Once you’re in the airport system, I intoned during the third hour, it feels like you’re in a parallel universe. In a strange land that exists alongside real life, but is indisputably separate. In airports, you don’t truly exist anywhere. Location and time cease to have any relevance to what you’re here to do, which is to wait. You linger impatiently until you eventually get to leave. If you’re lucky, you simply re-enter the world on the other end of your flight – but sometimes there is more waiting in store. By the time you step through the front doors and into the sun, it may be a different season, a different time, a different language, and a whole host of new sensations to contend with. So much bustling; a shock to the system after so much time doing nothing.

I must say, as I prepare to embark on my next solo trans-oceanic journey, I can’t help but hope I can be that twenty-four-year-old again in some respects. These days I’m not as cash-strapped, so I will likely buy myself that drink. I’ll probably stare at my phone and avoid eye contact with strangers. Not only would Paul have no reason to talk to me today, but I doubt I would be receptive in the same hair-brained, but beautiful way.

As the third hour at that bar finally elapsed and the playlist was well into its fifth orbit since I had started listening, Paul suddenly exclaimed, “We need to get to the gate!” He threw some balled-up cash on the counter like in the movies and off we raced. Paul was pretty slow, seeing that he was in his mid-seventies, but we got there.

We tipsily asked the good people of Air New Zealand to seat us together if possible, and they wonderfully acquiesced. On this flight, there was complimentary wine! And a Lord of the Rings-themed safety video. O, happy days. 

Once the plane landed in Christchurch, everything sped up quite suddenly. It was late at night by then, almost midnight. Paul and I gathered our carry-ons, disembarked, and stumbled through security – I had to go through customs and he didn’t. By the time I got to the carousel, he’d already grabbed his bag and mine was slowly rotating, waiting for me. I walked through a sliding door, and there was my dear S. waiting for me, looking like he hadn’t had a haircut in four months, which he hadn’t. And Paul’s wife was there too.

“Well, goodbye!” Paul stammered abruptly, when he realized we were leaving the parallel universe of the airport.

“Yeah! Good meet you!” I bumbled out in not actual English, half-embracing S, and half wanting to say goodbye properly. 

With that, Paul disappeared into the folds of his homeland. I never bothered to learn his last name, and he hadn’t bothered to learn mine, for we were mere airport friends. Out into the humid, New Zealand air. The ground felt strange – too solid. It was mild and smelled like vegetation, a scent I hadn’t enjoyed in months. The real world ushered me once more into its traffic patterns, and crisp oxygen, and gravity, and mess, and wilderness. Until the next flight.

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