Several weeks ago, a good friend of mine dropped dead outside the dry cleaners. He was just leaving—coat hanger hooked around his middle finger, suit jacket pressed inside its plastic covering—when he went into cardiac arrest. He died right there on the street. Before an ambulance even had a chance to get there.
A stylish man. A complicated man. A man of many suits and many jackets. It was his mother who was senseless and unimaginative enough to bury him in the same one that had crumpled in a black heap on the pavement beside him.
A few days earlier at a baptism we both attended, the suit jacket had been unceremoniously splattered in vomit after a proud mother pressed her Newly Anointed onto his breast.
If you’re like me and my dead friend Patrick—not interested in having babies or in guaranteeing their access to heaven—baptisms, with their heavy atmospherics and whiff of pretension, feel outdated and tedious. In one of our last moments together we escaped outside while our friends ate club sandwiches, drank herbal tea, and compared babies. We sat on the ground down the side of the church, our backs to the wall, smoking cigarettes. Not a tree in sight, the sun’s heat blasting down on us in our heavy formal wear, we commented on the adjustments our friends were making to their personalities in order to fit into the sprawling suburbs to which they had moved. Those ones that keep popping up along the highway, full of young families, identical new-builds, and pavements wide enough for a three-across stroller.
‘Next stop libertarianism, domestic paranoia, and SSRIs,’ Patrick said. And for a brief moment, it felt like we were the ones sitting on horses.
We agreed, right then and there, that there was nothing worse than being single at a baptism on a Sunday afternoon. This exchange happened, naturally, before the vomiting incident and, thanks to the baby, Patrick had an excuse to leave and I had an excuse to drive him home.
Turns out Patrick had a congenital heart defect. More specifically, a secundum atrial septal defect. Which meant he was born with a hole in his heart. He’d kept that a secret from almost everyone he knew. The secret being that his life was charged with the miracle of knowing it could be cut short at any minute. That he was living precisely as he meant to, with lots of gorgeous men flitting through his gorgeous inner city apartment. A trumped up wine cellar, expensive manchester, Spanish shoes, ski holidays.
My first reaction to the news of his heart was total betrayal. It was like making an agreement with a friend to attend a gallery opening in work clothes—a mess, no lipstick, ballet flats, shiny, and not in a good way—then arriving to discover she’s glittering like a souped up cassowary in square-toed kitten heels, with a silk-blend pashmina draped across her shoulders.
What I mean is that I thought we had an understanding. That we were made of the same stuff. Both of us quenching our boredom with Mezcal-infused nights with sweaty strangers. Coming down while the sun came up. Trudging through yet another hangover on our way to the opening night of yet another show.
Turns out he was just living like each day could be his last.
I, on the other hand, had no excuse for skating on the surface of things, looking for the next big buzz. Truth is, my life has always had an inessential quality to it. Not in a suicidal kind of way, that would require me to feel more deeply. I find everyday tasks immensely difficult. They take on monstrous proportions in my head. Turning on the dishwasher, scooping up the dust bunnies, choosing what to wear each morning, recycling.
Imagine a vast ocean, gun-metal grey beneath a weak sun, a lone seal swimming along, popping its head up for air every now and then. That’s how I feel most of the time. If I could, I would dissolve like aspirin into that great void and merge with everything. Become a piece of sky. Pure awareness. Nights out with Patrick reminded me that it wasn’t so much about the ocean as the people you were swimming alongside.
Three months after Patrick died, I was out of town for a tech conference. A tedious event my boss insists on sending me to each year in order to get the inside scoop on the vanguards of the future. It involves three days of righteous discussions on techno-utopias. Think AI architects, engineers, ethicists, and other self-congratulating titles. Peppy tech bros in microphone headsets pacing across a well-lit stage, gesticulating as preachers do about the latest innovation in pet monitoring technology.
As much as I despise the PowerPoints and the messiah complexes of the panel speakers, these three-day Odysseys are basically a total fuck fest. In the aquatic blue lighting of the convention centre, sex hangs heavily in the air. Rapid, syncopated jungle percussion accompanies every morning and afternoon tea break. We stalk through the expo room sucking air through our teeth, shimmying our long lost tails.
It’s a bit like school camp, the tech industry doing a complete takeover of nearby hotels. Men and women scurry up and down the internal stairs all night long, knocking on each others doors, making cloying passes in the lobby. There is something about tech bros. So self-assured. Charged by the same electricity that sends men hurtling into space and nukes into foreign territories.
This time around, I met a guy called Gavin. Everything went like clockwork. He was married, of course, but saving the world comes with certain liberties. He selected a sushi train bar where we sipped warm sake and watched food rattle slowly past us on carriages. He spoke at triple speed, with animated hand gestures, yet ate as slowly and meticulously as a monk. I had to hold myself back from sticking whole pieces of inari-zushi into my mouth while he walked me through his rigorous morning routine.
‘Transcendental meditation. Four in the morning. To warm up between the ears. Then it’s gym shorts on. Sandbags, plates, dead lifts, curls. Isolate all the majors and minors, anabolicly speaking. Hit the desk while the blood’s hot and make some magic.’
I nodded, dumbfounded, as he stuck out a stubby, calloused finger for each thing he listed off. When he said ‘magic’ he looked at his hands as though he could heal an entire leper colony with them.
All that fast and slow of the sushi train, his hands, his mouth, the ambient techno music, the dim lights—it felt like the space-time continuum was warping. I was so appalled, so exasperated. I was immediately turned on.
Back at the hotel he fucked me like it was the Blitzkreig. We bent each other into every sign of the cuneiform system. Became both object and subject, the borders between self and other dissolving. Then the sprinklers came on. All of a sudden we were staring naked at each other from across the unmade bed, the icy needles pricking us back into awareness. The process of total estrangement was complete in a matter of seconds, and the man I’d wanted to swallow whole moments before looked more Christmas ham than human being.
We quickly put on our clothes and left the room, walked in single file with all the other hotel guests down the internal staircase. Everyone looked wounded, visibly shaken. We stood on the other side of the road, waiting for the fire trucks to come, looking around to see who had the frizziest bed hair, who had makeup smeared on their face or shirt collar. Who was with someone they shouldn’t be.
The sprinklers spoilt the next day too. Instead of a purifying effect, all that water made everyone feel dirty. Morning and afternoon tea no longer had the same spritz. Most people brought their flights forward and hardly anyone stayed for the closing networking drinks.
I hopped on the plane that evening, sitting in the aisle seat beside two people I recognised from the conference. A day before the incident, I would’ve happily acknowledged them, but none of us said a word. We just sat there, each carrying our own set of weights. I stared at the seat in front of me and for some reason thought about a pair of identical twins that went to my high school. Chelsea and Racquel. They were exceptionally good at sports: athletics, tennis, swimming, soccer. I could still picture their youthful physiques, their matching swimming togs and matching plaits that flopped down their backs. They came first and second place in almost everything. So much so, a highly contagious resignation spread through us students. We dropped off like flies, recognising that there was no point in clambering over one another for third place. I wondered whether high school sports set me up for the rest of my life.
The evening had gone to seed above the line of clouds, spreading a warm, red glow through the plane. By the time we landed, the sky was dead and grey. But it was Friday night, and the airport was a total buzz. Pant suits, high heels, blazers. Hundreds of wheels careening along the glossy floor. Tall beers at the bar for the men, thin flutes of bubbles for the ladies.
I had a vision of Patrick, waiting in the pick-up zone for me in his bright red Fiat so we could fly off to our favourite bar and order the usual. Tinned fish, lambs livers, gin martinis. With a surgeon’s precision we would spatchcock and debone every single tech bro, crushing what was left in the palm of our hands. He would’ve made me feel better about the sushi train, Gavin, the sprinklers. We would’ve gotten good and pissed and the bar staff would’ve shovelled us both into a wheelbarrow and rolled us on home.
But Patrick wasn’t there to pick me up. The pang in my heart felt malignant. My bleak reality was a return to my tiny rented apartment, where my Portugese flatmate Paola would be on the couch in her fluffy blue dressing gown, yapping away on her phone in that abrasive, prosodic language.
The airport, I realised, was a terrarium. A finely tuned atmosphere, not too dry, not too humid, all the essential facilities to sustain life. I decided to stick around. Perched on a high stool at the bar, I ordered an overpriced gin and tonic and a burger. Dunked fries in sauce. Watching, watching.
Colleagues embraced. Mothers dropped off children with oversized backpacks for a fortnightly visit to their fathers. Dogs sniffed about in their little uniforms. Pilots gestured to one another jovially, circling a coffee cart.
A sense of calm came over me sitting amongst all these people who had As and Bs and the means to get between them. I had nowhere to be. I watched people at the security screening remove their belts and shoes as if they were doing it just for me. The overhead speaker dinged and cried out names and flight numbers. I stayed there until the last flight came in. It might’ve been around 10.30. I drank several glasses of gin before the bartender suggested I might not get past security. I told him I wasn’t catching a flight, and his face flickered to a different expression, one that had me all figured out.
‘We worry about you,’ Fran said the next morning, placing her clammy hand on my shoulder.
‘I wish I hadn’t told you the story now,’ I said.
Her eyes glistened like two bowls of milk as she leaned down to inhale the top of her baby’s head. ‘Wasn’t it expensive?’
‘It would’ve been more expensive if I stopped somewhere else to eat on my way home. That’s two taxis.’
I demonstrated the number with my fingers.
‘And you enjoyed it there? Drinking at the airport?’
‘It was better than going home.’
‘That’s awful.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘I just wish you had someone to go home to.’
‘I have Paola,’ I said, popping the ‘pow’ like a toy gun. Right between the eyes of Fran’s baby, who hadn’t stopped staring at me since we first sat down in the café.
‘I miss Patrick too,’ Fran said.
‘The baby is doing the staring thing again,’ I said, and prodded his belly, ‘little Satan baby.’
‘I wish you’d just call him Alfie.’
It was hard to be kind to a nine-month-old when the person holding it was speaking to you in the condescending tone she used with everyone since becoming a mother. We met every Sunday morning: Fran had insisted on it after the funeral. Every Sunday was a slow, disjointed game of badminton due to interruptions from Alfie either being sick on himself or starfishing his hands at Fran’s breasts.
‘Same time next week?’ she said.
I nodded, and she brought me into an embrace that smelled like lanolin. Then she collected up all her baby gadgets and left.
I woke up the next day with a diabetic headache after red wine and takeout in my bedroom. I called the office to tell them I’d be working from home. I figured if I lay low for a few days, any questions about the trip would get lost in the corporate vortex.
I sat at my desk and jiggled the mouse. Took to my face with tweezers. Paola was in the kitchen cooking and talking with the phone on loud speaker. There was a faint smell of burning coming from the oven grill. I sighed, leant back in my chair, and shut my eyes.
I imagined leaving my body. Zooming up through the roof until I was looking at the top of the building, then at the whole city, then the whole country. I shot up through the clouds, up through the stratosphere. Up and up until I was among the glittering stars and the space junk. I looked back down at Earth, which was just a small, blue, watery dot. Then the chair creaked and I plummeted back toward myself, pausing to hover just above my body. I looked so lonely sitting there in that cramped apartment, my knees up against my chest, computer screen lit-up but empty. I fast-forwarded through the day like it were CCTV footage, saw nothing changing in the room except my hand occasionally moving the mouse or scratching my face. Strips of light doing snakes and ladders across the carpet until it got dark.
There was a bus stop just around the corner that was on the airport route. I packed my things, dropped down the elevator, and waited for the next bus to come. It was nearly full by the time we got to the airport. Being pressed in on all sides by these people, it felt like we were a team. We hopped off the bus and walked through the automatic doors of the airport as one.
I cast my eye over the check-in area, felt my secret burn my cheeks. I was like a teenager again, lying to my parents and sneaking out to a party. I got the same feeling I do wearing no underwear in public. I went straight to the coffee cart.
‘Where are you off to?’ the barista asked.
‘Work,’ I said, rolling my eyes, ‘the usual.’
‘I don’t know how you commuters do it,’ she said, handing me a cup.
‘You get used to it.’
I locked eyes with a woman who raised her eyebrows at me in acknowledgement of the growing queue at the security screening. I lifted my shoulders in a ‘there’s-nothing-we-can-do-about-it’ shrug and went and sat at a low table beside the window looking out over the tarmac. The sun was streaming in, illuminating dust spirals above. Small pockets of chatter fluttered and disappeared up into the high ceiling.
I stayed there all afternoon, answering emails and populating documents. There were plenty of food options—poke bowls, fried chicken, bagels. Bathrooms close by. Massage chairs. Stores to buy snacks and phone chargers and romance novels. A sense of impermanence constantly being refreshed as the place filled and emptied with each take-off and landing.
I started going to the airport often. It was here I felt my most porous. My favourite time was the quiet of the morning, just before the place burst to life. I liked watching the people who landed coming out of the gate. Being right there with them as they returned back to earth, having survived the impossibility of flight. I’d often see politicians being pestered by journalists, citizens rubbernecking in their wake. Reunions, affairs, tearful goodbyes.
I would go to the international terminal if I really wanted to feel something universal. Sitting in the arrivals lounge, I could watch endless happy reunions, like a highlights reel. There was one that stuck with me. An old woman curled up like a small bird being wheeled out by an air hostess. Outside the gate, a tiny baby was plopped on her lap and a man said ‘meet your great-grandson.’ Everyone within earshot had a little shimmer in their eye as the little old lady expertly scooped up the bundle as she’d done over and over with each new branch of the family tree.
You’d be surprised at the kind of things that end up in the lost and found at the airport. So many things are left unclaimed each year, they host an auction to make space in the storage room. Jewelry, cameras, designer handbags, hair dryers, gaming consoles, snakeskin boots, sex swings. I happened to be there on the day of an auction. Between meetings I watched, holding a bidding paddle for the hell of it. It was the strangest mix. All kinds of eccentric, wealthy looking people seemed to emerge out of the woodwork for it.
The auctioneer gabbered on and on, revealing his marvels. With each new item, he would give the flight number and the country of departure, which prompted murmurs in different cadences among the crowd.
There was an entire section of the auction dedicated to suits. All of them hung up, plastic wrapped and fresh from the dry cleaners. Georgio Armani, Hugo Boss, Tom Ford, double-breasted, single-breasted, linen, woollen, penguin, tweed.
They were selling like hot cakes. A hot-blooded animal smell rose above the seats and the bidding paddles flapped with great virility.
‘Now this one is really special,’ said the auctioneer. ‘Flight EK448 from Milan, with a stopover in Dubai.’
He paused, letting the facts sink in. A lascivious smile settled on his lips. The bidders bristled in their seats.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, a dark grey, pin-striped tuxedo from Prada. Mens 38. Limited edition.’
I don’t know what came over me. In an instant, my paddle was up, and I was in with the tigers bidding away next month’s wages. I gnashed my teeth and raised the stakes until mine was the last paddle up and I was bright red and panting.
I cried out in elation. ‘Yes!’
The suit was mine. I collected it gingerly at the end. Paid an amount I’m not prepared to disclose, and hooked the coat hanger over my finger and returned to my laptop.
I was tucking into a donburi when I saw one of Patrick’s old lovers, Will, walk out of Gate 22. We’d met several times, usually late at night with a Negroni in hand at Patrick’s apartment. They’d spent a few months together, longer than usual for Patrick—who had a complicated dating etiquette. I probably liked him the most out of all the men he brought home, and I think Patrick had felt the same.
Will was gentle. The kind of person who might decorate his home with pinecones. Patrick said that the guy was heartbroken when he ended it with him.
Will looked thin and froggy, his head bobbing as he walked through the airport. He caught sight of me and weaved his way through the tables toward me.
‘Julie, it’s been a long time,’ he said.
‘I haven’t seen you since the fireplace incident.’
‘I’ve still got a scar on my knee,’ he smiled and looked down sheepishly.
The three of us had had a late night draped across Patrick’s sofas. Will was stoking the fire when Patrick bit his bottom. He fell onto the fireplace, getting burns up one arm and a split knee. Patrick took him to the emergency department and sat by his side into the wee hours, waiting for him to have his knee stitched and his burns dressed. I could tell Patrick liked him by how concerned he was. He broke up with him the following day.
‘Where’ve you come from?’ I asked.
‘I was visiting my grandmother; she’s just gone into a home.’
I smiled at him, of course he was.
‘And you? Where are you going?’ he asked.
‘I like to come here sometimes. Watch the planes take off and land.’
‘Oh,’ Will said, and hoisted his satchel up on his shoulder. ‘What’s with the suit?’
‘There was an auction for unclaimed baggage,’ I said. ‘It reminded me of Patrick.’
‘I was so sorry when I heard. I had no idea.’
‘Me neither.’
‘Truth be told I was so angry at him. Then he died and I spent weeks going over our time together.’
‘Looking for clues?’
‘Of sorts.’
‘He wouldn’t let anyone get too close. I realise that now.’
Will looked around me. Saw the various papers, the stack of takeaway coffee cups, and gestured at my laptop, ‘Do you really come here to work?’
‘Yes,’ I said, looking out the window. A precocious golf cart beetled across the tarmac dragging a trailer piled high with luggage. ‘It make me feel like I’m going places.’