I began by screening the carry-ons. Looking for the sharp item, the explosive in the luggage. I saw the ghostly outlines of the passengers’ shoes, jewelry, slacks, lingerie, cameras, the harmless items they tried to sneak through, like a bottle of wine or jar of mustard or jam, and the stupid items, like the scissors and knives. I was good at finding things. I was relentless. I wondered if the passengers ever thought of me as the planes lifted, wings cutting brash into the blue sky, as they gripped the plastic arms of their seats and let out a breath, looking down at the earth through the clouds. If they ever believed in some part of themselves that I had, perhaps, kept them safe.
WHEN I WASN’T PEERING AT LUGGAGE, I MADE MY ATTEMPTS TO construct a life. I watched the rest of my crew, who had spouses and coffee tables and cars. We had trained together, six of us, all walking into the multi-purpose room that held the session, all of us sitting under the sickly blue light, watching videos, power points, droning narration describing graphs, gestures, behavior, telling us who might bring harm.
They were the first people I had gotten to know since the accident; I was, just then, vulnerable to kindness, and they were generally kind to me. Getting to know them, I lost the need to meet anyone else. Also, each one reminded me of a member of my family. Lester had dark, spongy, lichen-like hair, the same texture as my father’s. Deanne walked briskly, like my sister did when she was planning some sort of coup. Joanne sometimes squeezed my shoulder the way my mother once did. It was as though my family had, like spies, slipped under their skin. We spent our days standing in the bluish airport security area, but between flight times, we became friends.
Each month brought some new announcement. Lester was engaged. Deanne was pregnant. Joanne’s son was graduating from college. There were showers, for brides, babies, there were cards circulated and donations taken for gifts. There were consultations about renovations; there were suggestions for mechanics and schools and what sort of covered dish to bring to church. Someone would drop some groceries by when I was sick, or lend me gardening tools, or help me fix my TV. There was a general sense of accumulation that was dumbfounding and strange and sweet.
MY APARTMENT HAD A BALCONY WITH A FEW POTS OF ROSES ON IT. I tended them; I bought frozen food and defrosted it for dinner; I watched comedies at night on TV. I had tried, a few times, to make inroads into the world of love, gone out with men whom I chatted with on the Internet. I had met a few of them, sat across from them in restaurants; they were desperate to be liked, the ones I met, and their chattiness about their virtues was depleting. Maybe that was why I didn’t want to go out with any of them more than once.
My fellow crew members were the ones I knew. They had staggered into the airport terminal from their own disasters, of various ilk: bad marriages, drug-addled kids, tumors, depressions, embezzling relatives, early deaths, the rest. We all said I’m sorry to each other; everyone had an individual mountain to scale. That was it. We were here to guard others. I felt useful when I stood with my crew at the security gate — that was what pulled me through my day, that sense of usefulness. I was grateful for it.
We all took our work seriously. Lester assumed a dignified, alert expression when he gazed at the X-ray machine, always locating the object that needed to be removed. Joanne was efficient, precise at patdowns. Estelle was good at helping people organize their possessions in the plastic bins. When I worked with them, I secretly tried to find the parts that seemed to have been sent to me. Lester’s hair. I watched the way he smoothed his hand over it, the way my father had done when he thought about his clients. Deanne’s walk. I waved her over, sometimes, when I did not need her, so I could watch her heels hit the floor, hard, the way my sister’s did when she needed to tell me something. And Harvey and Fernando and Joanne, each harboring their own treasures — Harvey pointed the way my father did when he was excited; Fernando’s mouth resembled my sister’s; Joanne let out a cackling laugh that my mother sometimes had. I didn’t love them, but I sort of did, if love is being mesmerized by the mere fact of others, and the way they trick you into believing that they contain the other people you have known. It was the sort of love I owned now, and I just lived with it, though I tried to remember what it was to have the love others did. I had those moments of jealousy, looking over the passengers streaming through the gateways — those passengers, strapped into their seats with the luxury of boredom and desire, waiting for their beverage service, believing that they would walk down the Jetway into the rest of their lives.
I went to work, balanced on my life, this tiny platform. Sometimes, heading to work, I felt like I was going to slide off of it, sparked by a small sight — a gardenia bush like the one that bloomed outside of our house, a blue Mercury driving by. But this usually faded when I entered the terminal, when I took my place at the podium, when my gaze was supposed to locate any hint of mishap in the world.
ONE DAY, JOANNE READ US ALL A MEMO; BUDGET CUTS WOULD NOW go into effect. We were not all necessary to preserving national security. One of us would be let go.
Joanne read this to us; it just had been emailed to ALL STAFF LOWER ATLANTIC REGION.
“What did they mean, go? To another airport?”
“No, go. They don’t need us. One of us.”
I looked at them. Joanne cleared her throat. Fernando tapped his foot. A harsh deodorant smell came off Deanne.
“How are they going to decide?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then what?”
“One of us is let go.”
While she was reading this, the second email came: Lester would decide. He had started here a year before the rest of us, and he had, as we all knew, stopped that guy with the steak knife in his sneakers the month before. He had six weeks, and Regional would abide by what he said.
I found it difficult to breathe. Would someone protest? No one did. We were weirdly passive in the face of this announcement. Our dark blue uniforms, so official, so comforting in their way, suddenly seemed nostalgic, with the flimsiness of Halloween costumes; Joanne fingered her collar with a tender gesture that I had never seen before.
“Everyone, stations!” said Joanne, and we took our posts.
WE WENT OUT TO RUBY TUESDAY A COUPLE TIMES, BUT NOW IT WAS different. Lester sat in the middle of the red booth, and everyone observed what he ordered. A crab-dip appetizer. Some mozzarella sticks. We all looked at one another. Joanne complimented him on his appetizer choice. She leaned toward him, asparkle with admiration.
“Crab dip. Good choice. I always loved its creamy texture.”
“Thanks, hon,” Lester said, dipping in a piece of garlic bread.
Suddenly, everyone was ordering crab dip, even those who, I knew, hated it. Several bowls of crab dip sat there, mostly untouched. I ordered one too, immediately. Everyone seemed both tender and monstrous. All anyone wanted was to stay, to be viewed as worthy of inclusion. It seemed the deepest desire, to be acknowledged, to be deemed worthy of remaining here, with the rest of us, and we sat around the table, eyeing the crab dip, hoping.
I noticed that the crew was acting a little differently now. The fact of our potential vanishing from this group freed everyone to reveal other elements of themselves. Now I noticed the things I didn’t want to remember about my family. Joanne suddenly switched from a brisk, efficient worker to a compulsive flatterer, something my sister tended to do. Deanne became a flirt, which my mother did with cashiers at the market when she was bored, and Fernando sat up taller and claimed the mozzarella sticks in a bossy way, the way my father made grand, bullish gestures when he was annoyed with all of us. My heart thrummed with panic. The ground felt like sky.