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Africa

Michael Summerleigh

    He was alone. At 12.30 AM the terminal was empty. A handful of flights scheduled for arrival, but spread out over the next handful of hours. And the world turning, rushing headlong into some kind of mindless chaos in the face of something that had no face. Nothing that could be fought, except by cutting oneself off from everything that had ever been normal. And he had no idea what normal was anymore. Only that he was sitting in an empty airport waiting for someone who might not even be on a flight that might not even arrive...
    “...I don’t see why you have t’be the one t’go?” he said.
    “I’m the only one our group has got for this, Denny. I’m the one took all the right grad courses...did research and lab work...and prayed I’d never have t’put any of it to use...”
    “They can send someone else.”
    “No they can’t. I’m the one. The one who knows how t’deal with this...”
    “You could die!”
    “We’re all dying, Denny. But those people don’t deserve what’s gotten loose into the world. We’ve spent the last five hundred years preying on them; they deserve something back besides more crap from white people...and we have no idea what’s happening there...”
    The overhead PA system hummed into life, some meaningless announcements about masks and maintaining social distance. He laughed. There wasn’t anybody anywhere in the goddamn airport.
    “This is stupid just tell them you don’t wanna go!”
    “Denny I DON’T don’t wanna go...”
    “I love you.”
    “Fuck! I love you too but I’m sorry this has got nothing t’do with you and everything t’do with me. I can’t...won’t...sit by and let this happen when there’s a chance I can help do something t’stop it...”
    He conjured up the lilt in her voice, the unmistakeable Aussie that made him go weak in the knees just by listening...and the desperation in his heart while she pleaded with him to understand...promised she would come back...
    “Denny you just have t’trust me in this, please. I love you. I’ve never loved anybody as much as I love you...but I have t’go. I have t’do something. It’s who I am and I can’t be who you want me t’be without being me first ...”
    The terminal had gone quiet again. His mask was soggy and his ass had gone numb in the quiet. He stood up, moved to another moulded plastic seat in the waiting area and heard the rain start to slash at the plate glass looking out over the empty runways. The overhead PA announced a flight, incoming from Nairobi, started playing music again. An hour later, he was still waiting, checking his phone every five minutes, staring at the text he’d gotten that afternoon...

    INCOMING 11:47 PM. BE VERY CAREFUL. I MISS YOU.

    ...Nodding off...wondering why he had to be very careful...startled awake at the sound of someone calling his name. He looked around blearily, but he was still alone and the terminal was still empty. A handful of flights were scheduled for arrival, but spread out over the next handful of hours...except now it was after 1.00 AM and as he looked up at the monitors in the central aisles he saw that the incoming flight from Nairobi had hit the ground in the last ten minutes...and there was another text on his phone:

    I LOVE YOU. I’M SO SORRY. RUN.

    He checked the monitor again, found the gate number for the Nairobi flight and realised it was three gates away...a few hundred yards...his trotters not making much of any sound at all...and found no one waiting for him...
    He stopped. Saw an attendant at the desk look up at him and turn away. When he called out he saw her face for an instant before she literally fled from him, back through the boarding gate...back into the plane. When he reached the desk she was gone, but beside it was a large gym bag with its contents scattered over the flooring.
    Cargo pants. Panties. Brassieres. Blouses. Sandals and tampons. A paperback copy of The Night Circus by someone named Erin Morgenstern. A cosmetics bag ripped open...toothbrush and combs...a hairbrush...a tube of toothpaste crushed and hemorrhaging Colgate with Whitening Protection...a cotton cloth mask ground under a boot-heel...
    Her gym bag. The one she’d had with her on Bronte beach...the day he had met her, on holiday, and everybody freaking out about another shark attack and pissed off about not being allowed in the water.
    “We’re just food t’them,” she said. “It’s what they are, and if we ignore them it’s our own damned fault if they chew us up and spit us out. We’ve been taught we have t’have what we wanna have whenever we want it...like it’s our right and privilege never to be inconvenienced or denied a bloody thing. Except today...so me, I’m not going in the water, is all. I’ll get a suntan and tomorrow you, me and all of my body parts that you keep staring at can go for breakfast...”
    He conjured up the image of her in his head. That first day, and this unbelievably gorgeous thing in a string-bikini talking to him...taking him home and making love to him...and in the morning...a beautiful gentle creature who smiled like the beginning of Time and crept into his arms to talk and laugh and make love again like they’d known each other for lifetimes...
    “I love you. You need to remember that.”
    He did remember. Every waking minute of every day she’d been gone, and every night when he went looking for her in his dreams...
    And now she was somewhere close by. He had heard her voice, had not been dreaming at all. At his feet was all her stuff, and a small trail of smeared toothpaste that led to a door off the accordion walk into the plane. He thought for sure it would be locked, but it wasn’t, and the stairway on the other side led him down under the terminal into a rabbit-warren of passageways...shadowless in the glare of long fluorescents overhead... the rumble of unseen generators and the breath of unseen unliving machines breathing canned air through vents high up along the corridors. His phone chimed at him. Another text.

    IT WAS “SENT” TO CHINA AFTER THEY “TESTED” IT IN NIGERIA. IT WAS NEVER MEANT TO REACH AMER

    At the end of the corridor he heard a door open...looked up and saw three of them...like the ones he’d seen on the news before he left for the airport...in Portland... carrying off protesters in unmarked vans...tear-gassing “terrorists”...
    He realised why she’d told him to run. He realised it was too late.

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