“You could be here awhile.”
Wilson shrugged.
“I’ll put these up front,” the skycap told him. “That way you won’t have to kick ’em through the line.”
Wilson fumbled a five-dollar bill from his pocket, thanked the man for his help, and joined the winding queue in front of the British Airways counter. There were fifty or sixty people ahead of him, bored and impatient, tired even before their trip began. With their luggage and carry-ons, they looked like refugees. Wilson watched as the skycap made his way to the front of the line, where he stopped and dragged the suitcases from the cart, using both hands. Then he called out something to one of the ticket agents, and nodded in Wilson’s direction. The agent looked up, saw the sling, and nodded.
Wilson’s shirt was damp with sweat, which gave him a chill, but his face was flushed and hot. His stomach was waltzing in his gut and, worst of all, a moiré pattern was beginning to form in the corner of his right eye, a silver flutter that amounted to a hole in his peripheral vision. Soon, he knew, the glitter would spread from one eye to the other, and then he’d be blind. Or almost blind. Bedazzled, in any case.
Like a dance troupe, the people in front of him lifted their suitcases. Stepped forward. Stopped. Set their bags down, and fell back in conversation.
The first time it happened, when he was nineteen or twenty, Wilson didn’t know what it was, or what to do. He’d been scared to death. Thought he had a brain tumor. Thought he was going blind for real. But no. They gave him a CAT scan at the hospital, and the results were normal. The doctor called it an ophthalmic migraine, a rare condition that seemed to be stress-related. There wasn’t much in the literature about it, but they thought it had something to do with intelligence, because the only people who “expressed” a migraine in quite that way were “off the charts.”
So the eye thing wasn’t a problem, really. Just an inconvenience. And the trade-off was that, while he ended up with a migraine, it didn’t hurt. And it wouldn’t last long. Half an hour at most, and only a couple of times a year. Often enough that by now Wilson knew what to do: Ride it out.
Which wasn’t so easy, really. Because the only time he ever got these things was when he was under a lot of stress.
Not that he couldn’t handle it. In high school, his senior year, he caught three passes in a game with a herringbone pattern undulating in the air between him and the ball. Years later, in a meeting with the government’s lawyers – when they told him they were fucking him – he had one then, too. And no one noticed. No one saw what he’d seen: the gleam in the air, dancing between them. So he sat there, blind as a bat and surrounded by lawyers, listening as the guy from the Pentagon explained what he called “the facts of life.” 35 USC 131. Eminent domain as it applies to intellectual property.
The next time it happened was… when? At his sentencing! And, after that, on the Con Air flight out to Colorado. Where they buried him alive for what amounted to wishful thinking. (Or as the court put it, for “solicitation of murder.”)
But no one knew about his eyes, no one ever guessed. Not the guards, and not the other prisoners. So, really, it was just one of those things, one of those “Here we go again” kind of things.
Still, it wasn’t something you could ignore. And now it was taking over, glazing everything in the corners of his eyes. His peripheral vision was almost gone. People and things were beginning to disappear. Soon-
“-time?”
Wilson blinked. “Sorry?” The woman in front of him, a girl, really, was asking him the time.
“I just asked, ‘Is this your first time?’”
He tried to focus, to see around the aura or through it, but of course he couldn’t. Even so, he could tell she was young, maybe twelve or thirteen, with henna-colored hair, cut short. And a backpack. Green earrings, which snapped into focus for a moment. Gumbys. “First time for what?”
“Flying.”
The question was so naïve, so very much out of left field, that he almost laughed. “No,” he said. “I’ve been up a couple of times.”
She nodded thoughtfully. After a bit, she asked, “Is it scary? I’ve never actually flown before.”
“No kidding!”
He glanced at his watch. 5:48… 5:45… 5:43. “It’s a lot more dangerous on the ground,” he said. “Planes are pretty safe.” The line edged forward a couple of steps, and he saw that she moved awkwardly, leaning on a cane and dragging her left leg.
“Looks like you’ve been skiing.”
A soft, regretful chuckle. “No, I’ve never been skiing.”
He thought she was going to say something else, but the moment passed. Then the line inched ahead again, and so did she. No cast. Just the cane. Something congenital, then.
“What about you?”
At first, he didn’t know what she meant. Then he remembered the sling, and – “Oh, you mean this! Yeah, I was at… Killington.” He could see Gumby’s awkward smile floating behind the moiré pattern. In five or six minutes, the girl would be gone. Almost all of them would be.
He could almost see it: the blood and the glass, bodies wet and smoking on the marble floor. People staggering through the rubble, shell-shocked, deaf and bleeding. And the silence – like after a car crash. Everything would be silent, if only for a couple of seconds. Then the quiet would give way to a wail of recognition. The air would fizz and the cries would go up, filling the vacuum with noise until it exploded into a long, collective scream.
Restraining the impulse to glance at his watch, Wilson lowered his head toward the girl, and said, “Excuse me?”
She turned and looked up at him.
“Would you mind holding my place?”
“No,” she said. “I mean, sure! I’d be happy to.”
“’Cause I’ll just be a minute.” A hint of embarrassment in his tone.
“No problem!”
“Thanks.”
With a wince that was meant to be a smile, Wilson set off in the direction of the newsstand, leaving the queue, the girl, and the suitcases in his wake. It took all the willpower he had not to look over his shoulder and not to break into a run, but to walk slowly toward the restrooms-
And keep going.
An escalator delivered him, sweating and out of breath, to the baggage area below. He looked at his watch, but the glitter in his eyes made it impossible to read. 2:40? 2:10? 39 seconds? He couldn’t be sure.
Walking faster now, he went through a passageway to the outside, then quickly crossed the road to the short-term parking lot. Row 15.
The Jeep wasn’t there. Wilson’s stomach did a backflip, and a sizzle of panic shot through his chest. They’d fucked him.
He was looking around – there was nowhere to go – waiting for the world to explode, when he heard a horn and, turning, saw the Jeep, one row behind him. And there in the Jeep, Bo was laughing, waving him over. Wilson dashed between a phalanx of parked cars, yanked open the door to the passenger seat, and dove in.
As the car began to roll, Wilson realized that they weren’t alone. There was a guy in the backseat who looked like an Arab – an older guy he’d never seen before. And he was smiling. Nodding approval.
Likewise Bobojon, who was good to go, with the parking chit in his lap and dollar bills at the ready. Even so, it was taking a long time to get out of the lot. A BMW sat in front of them at the parking attendant’s booth, while the woman behind the wheel rummaged through her purse, babbling apologies. So they sat there in the Jeep, waiting for the terminal to blow, waiting for all hell to break loose, while this crazy bitch rooted around for her Platinum card.