The Night of the Iguana and Of Human Bondage

It’s concentric circles of intersecting and loping streets, overhangs of deciduous leaves, blossom trees like rooted sentries in the Blackrock neighborhood. The southern face of Bridgeport wears itself freshly. The outermost street is lined with green steel lights, and as you wind along, they make a stairway halfway up the sky. My favorite professor grew up here, where my daughter does now. The red and white striped smokestack paints false recollections of an industrious time, the days of PT. Barnum and Bailey being long gone. “The Greatest Show on Earth.” My dad, visiting, noted that this year it was closing. The candy cane fumes on and on, above in uncharted territory.

On Easter weekend, we followed marks, little cardboard signs with arrows and an address. We followed it and lost it and surprisingly came upon it, the estate sale. It was mostly prints of paintings, maritime, Modernists and Impressionists, some hackneyed adventure Westerns, and art books, Cezanne’s Watercolors, Renoir, and some other leatherbounds and paperbacks. In these, you could see multiple overlapping Venn diagrams emerge in the topics of the titles. There were gardening books, the art of cooking and gourmet cuisine books; spiritual and religious guides, musings and treatises, East to West, the full body of God, as one, as trinity, as all, pantheism, Zoroastrianism, Augustine’s Confession and Spinoza On Ethics. And twopenny mysteries, Doyle, Agatha Christie mostly. The owner stared into the distance, sitting at a pupil’s desk at the front of the garage between its divided open doors, with a marker-drawn sign saying, “Signed Prints $5” as my family and other small-time day adventurers in spring day-wear pilfered his belongings. $1 for any book. $5 to $10 for prints.

I bought the only literary books there. The Awakening, for my wife, and The Night of the Iguana and Of Human Bondage for me.

That week I started my new copywriting job in the Bronx. I read half of Tennessee William’s play before landing at Harlem 125th Street. Below the lifted green track, the station is a dreamy remnant inside, charming as an old fashioned Western stop. But there is no peace in that place. There is screaming and honking, trash littered at each step like the feet of a ruler. Congregations buying and selling cigarettes, 8:15 joints smoked furiously, homeless men lounging on steps and scratching themselves. Other types stationed like tour-guides on the corners, making passes at passers-by and catching eyes defiantly. On the way home, a man and a woman were separated mid-fight. The woman yelling, “You never paid for shit,” and the man, screaming over and over, “Don’t anyone ever tell me to suck a dick!”

At the landing, we stood among the rooftops and I refused a man a dollar. He came to me urgently, “Brother, brother, brother…” I finished The Night of the Iguana on the way home, and in the next week, I read Of Human Bondage. The homeless man was a fixture. Over the days, I gave him two dollars; he turned down a slice of pizza from 2 Bros’ Pizza. And I’ve picked up a similarity in the man’s books.

The Reverend from William’s one-act worked himself into such hysterics he could not escape his bonds. He was fated into sensual pleasures in young sirens and tortured by shame: caught in the act of jerking it. Philip, pleasured himself in pain, tortured himself in pleasure. The Reverend unloosed himself with a simple come-down and disappeared into the oppressive mist, leaving the charitable sketch-artist all alone. Her old father finished his poem and died. But Philip, he escaped nihilism into a meaningful pattern, as old as time. At the end of it all, outside, they lived for nothing; inside the personal weaving, was the beauty of life. It’s the best bildungsroman I’ve read.

My professor loved to teach Bible as literature. There was a chiastic structure in everything. God was systematically breaking down Abraham’s preservation, in life and lineage. Poor Isaac, got caught up in his old man’s value system and nearly got himself filicided. He also said just after he dies, he just wants to know if he was right in the way he lived his life, before he no longer exists.

And I keep thinking about the owner there. The only thing he said was a string of ‘okay’s to a friend offering to drive him to events at the nursing home.

The day of estate sale was beautiful. I was held in some kind of check by my mom, dad and sister, with all their entirely factual preconceptions of me. The sky had broken its colorless mold of winter and I was staring up into it. I’ve had a hard time knowing how to act here among the new coworkers, asking me about myself. My voice sounds hollow. I often misspeak after a pregnant pause. This neighborhood in the Bronx is the new DUMBO, they say. Its jammed with trendy restaurants and pop-up shops between dilapidated pawn and antique stores. The owners stand on the outside smoking cigarettes, waiting for the Clocktower and other studio developments to take over.

My coworker lamented they took out the History Channel billboard that’d been there since she was six-years-old. Now, it’s an FM radio ad, which is probably taking its last lap too. The turnover of thoughts and ideas and their mediums is faster than ever. There are two men with a fruit stand, mostly oranges, lemons, and limes, at the end of the street. One faces the cars cruising and careening onto a speedy overpass. The other picks at his guitar. My first day, I saw petals blown off by the breeze fall on them like heavy snow. It was like nothing I’d seen.

My dad prides himself on being a listener of tales. This is his truth. He led the son down a story — the landing was they were selling the place after all these years. On the market now. Nowhere to put all this stuff. “Did he own an art store?” my dad prodded. “No, but he was always buying collections when art stores were going out of business…And he was an artist too.” Only a few feet away, the man didn’t register a reaction. But before we left, someone bought a signed print. The print was hanging directly above him, nailed to the white New England wood: A line drawing like constellations of Jesus in thorns, with geometric squares for cheeks and a blank look in his prismic eyes. Was he still thinking on this Good Friday, what really, the hell, is going on here?

Transportation Security Administration

In the early morning, when the blinking blue, red lights of police cars, the neon signage on hourly buses, the bright yellow paint job of an occasional passing taxi picking up a no doubt lonely, friendless arrival, all blink and blur on the dark surfaces of the large paneled windows, the stream of travelers is only a trickle of red-eye passengers wearing drooping suits and rolling the perfectly fitting overhead bags, only a few of them dropped off by a personal car, and even less kiss their significant other on the way inside, and I am absent-minded, focused on trivialities, by my most willful intentions.

You know these “Prank” videos of people, mostly white kids in their teens, or early twenties, entering the so-called hood and duping its inhabitants, if you can really call it duping, have any of them ever died pranking? I watched a twenty minute compilation of it last night, a montage of pranksters approaching young black teens with ambiguous phrases like, “You wanna punch?” or “Wanna fade?” and wait for them to react, hopefully aggressively. Without a reaction, they incessantly chatter, until the victim is about to walk off, confused, or winding up to take an aggressive swing. Right before, usually, they produce that prop, acting like the pranked was the insane one. “No, punch…the soda,” One by one, video montage clip show them getting punched in the face, intimidated with a knife or a gun, along with plenty of violent threats. I was laughing.

One kid was sitting inside a bathroom stall when his prank victims discovered he was filming, and started shouting at him, like, “I’m gonna murder you, you fucking idiot spic,” I think he said, the larger one in the white tank and stylings of a neo-nazi. “It’s just a youtube video,” the kid trembling, good place, at least, for shitting himself. His assailants weren’t amused. “You wanna die in a youtube video?” And how’d he respond? “Um, it would probably get a lot of views, but no thank you.” I mean, the presence of mind to deliver such a line, Jesus.

As the morning goes on, I lose the bright signals among the daylight and its detailing of the overhead Boston turnpike’s spiraling on and upward to the clouds and contrails like a science fiction day Babel, and the incoming cars pull up to the curb, pull off, and the cigarettes and trash blow up into the air. Here, in the daytime, the frenetic, almost puppet-like movements of the boarders is in direct contrast to the languid, blurringly slow squalor of blue uniforms.

It’s bad, I know, but sometimes I forget we aren’t going through irreverent motions of a sacred rite, and that, actually, real people will be climbing aboard a plane, reaching the god-like height of 30,000 feet and transporting themselves halfway across the country or the world. By the looks on their faces, the passengers are very aware of their solemn, but meaningful journey. Generally, they quietly offer up the shoes onto the conveyor belt, assuming their small, yet important task, before softly walking through the metal detector. Mike jilts the reverse switch for a second, double-taking on eyeliner-turned-knife, or simply a slip of the finger.

Doug prowls around the corner. During breaks, this fucker tells us about how he trains his pitbull on the weekends, and watches the beasts’ muscles grow tawny, explosive. Swears he’s not a dog fighter, he tells us what Sargent would do if he got in a fight in too realistic detail. He attacks every syllable: “He wuld jut tear that lit’l fucker up,” jaw always clenched tight at this point. “It’s bad-ass.”

Doug uses the dog’s freakish athletic ability to compensate for his own shape, I’m fairly certain. He’s pushing 200 hundred pounds in the wrong way, a lumpy way. He walks around with his hands on his haunches like he’s fingering his pistol on a loose, leather western holster slung low under the bulge of his stomach. His thinning, pale blonde hair is the type that reveals the color of his ruddy skin beneath it, and it doesn’t help at all that he spikes it.

I think Doug irons his uniform. Or his girlfriend does. I thinks he buffs the badge too, even though they come cloudy straight out of the box. The few times he talks about his girlfriend, it’s funny, he uses that same staccato voice. “I jut love to tear that tight ass up!”

“Got another, right here,” Doug points out his victim by fully extending his arm. The bright blue latex glove gleams like an alarm’s light. “Can’t be too careful, can we, sir?”

The man’s knees buckle, arms go slack. He appeals to me and my misleadingly sympathetic visage. Knee-jerk, I grimace to him. He nods, as if he understands an unsaid solidarity and faces his inquisition alone. I don’t think I’m being dramatic.

I’ve been on the other side of the silver machinery, on the other side of the oversize blue uniform, taking flights twice yearly at least. On this side, the indifference is never as innocuous as it seems to me. It’s like moving through a mausoleum, marble, or stone, that reverence, but replaced by dingy, lackluster steel.

I think it’s been said before that the airplane is a giant, metallic coffin. Not a coffin for burial, but a processional coffin. Or, props life coaches and psychologists use to scare or familiarize their patients with death. In the actual airplane transportation scenario, you can pay for the felt distance from death. First class.

Doug hasn’t quite tapped down his usual fair share of passengers yet, and leaning on an especially high stack of plastic trays, he sticks out an alert head, following each potential terrorist  with bright eyes; steady glow, then suddenly light up. Doug stalks around the conveyor belt, swiveling his body, his head fixed on a blonde teenager wearing a white and red lifeguard tee shirt, and matching red canvas shorts–the hair and good looks as much a part of his uniform as the red cross centered in his chest. Doug yells out, more like a bar fight, “Random Security Check.”

Looks like the caffeine is infiltrating Tildy’s and Harold’s bloodstreams right about now, which results in the present light-hearted conversation they run through every morning. Typically, the two take a coffee, and add their sugar and cream without ever moving their mouths. Then they settle down on the black swivel chairs and let the passengers re-shelve the plastic bins themselves. After about thirty minutes, Tildy and Harold liven up, their ashen faces re-animate, and they make it their personal goals to recall and gather bits of knowledge.

“Hernandez. You see that?”

“Oh, I saw that. Shame, man.”

“40 million dollar contract he turned his back on.”

“If he did it.”

“If he did.”

“What I wouldn’t do for 40 million.”

“I’d kill for 40 million.”

Chummy har-hars. 

The blonde teen fumbles with his tennis shoes’ laces, and hiking up his Abercrombie pants with his one free hand, he power-walks off.

“Not so cute anymore, is he?” Doug laughs. He snaps the latex gloves off his hands like a doctor. He takes a big sniff and walks away.

David passes by our security gate, and seeing Doug, mimics his large, jaunty steps and sticks his nose up in the air like a hunting dog on a trace. He moves in, dangerously close to Doug, parading the caricature. Tildy gives a lively eye roll. I have the feeling David would act the same even if no one else was here to see it.

In fact, that’s why he’s not on the security gate anymore. “Unaware of his surroundings,” was the wording on the official transfer paperwork. He was often cited with inappropriate and terrorizing language, like when David told me how he fucking exploded an egg in the microwave and had to wipe its guts up, or when he explained to me his theory on 9/11, or when asked by a nervous woman in her 50’s, “I’ve never been on a plane before. It’s not dangerous, is it?” he went on to detail the many possible failures and instances of these disasters, “There are cases of all four engines going out at once, actually. Is it likely? Of course not. Could it happen to you? Yes. Not to mention fast appearing instances of inclement weather.”

She looked to me, wordlessly supplicating, “It’s not really that way, is it? None of it is true, right?” I subtly shook my head with a ridiculing smile. She walked off, still nervous, but reassured.

I once caught myself making that same face in the reflection of an airplane personal screen, situated on the back of the chair in front of me, when the video ended and abruptly snapped to vacantly black. See, right after I boarded and sat down, they played a news update of the disappearance of the AirAsia flight. Another plane vanishing out of the air. Maybe we say ‘vanished’ because we don’t like to imagine what actually happened, like a syntactical cut-away shot. And, like, how you deal with that kind of news right before a flight? Right before I locked eyes with myself on the screen, I remember thinking, “But that was Asia. This is America.”

David makes one last lewd gesture, as Doug returns to the line. “You know, I’ve had a bum knee for a couple years. It’s why I didn’t go to college. In fact, the basketball coach at UNC was recruiting me for a while.” There’s a man wearing a UNC hoodie approaching, and I’ll bet, the next, unfortunate, random man. “I told him I couldn’t give it my all.”

I’m on break, sipping on the bitter end of a Starbucks coffee and talking to Divya, the barista there. When you work at The Administration for this long, you get to know everyone who works in the airport. Here, in South Boston, it’s too far from anything to leave for lunch and come back, or have friends visit you at work. After the early morning rush, Divya hands one last drink to a customer before looking at me, standing at the raised counter with cream, and sugar I chew on the end of a wooden stirrer.

“What sport?” she asks.

“Basketball.”

“He’s 5’11’’.”

“I know.”

David flies by us on his airport transportation vehicle, then screeches to a stop. The thing beeps in reverse, grinning at us the whole time. A pudgy businessman side-steps his bumper.

“Hey David,” Divya says.

I just nod to him. “…I wonder if his girlfriend ever calls him out on his bullshit.”

“Who’s girlfriend?” David asks, raising his chin.

“I doubt it. She’s small and thin. Like, bony.”

“You’ve seen her?” I ask.

“Seen who? Who’ve you seen?” David’s questioning head is cocked almost parallel to the surface of the ceiling.

“Yeah,” Divya takes a sip from her large iced coffee. “It’s like she’s got something jabbed in her at all times.”

“What’s she do?”

David slams his palms on the steering wheel. “Guys. Who?”

“I think she’s a cleaner. Not because she’s Mexican, because she is, but because she had an inside-out cleaners uniform tied around her waist.”

“I didn’t really see Doug as the kind who’d date someone outside his…you know, so called race.”

“Oh, Doug!” David nods his head. “Ok.”

“You’ve seen her too?” I ask.

David nods, “Oh, no. I haven’t.”

Divya responds, to me, “When I saw her, she was meeting up with Doug. He was joking, half-joking, maybe? saying he’d have her ‘back over the fence’ if she dressed like that.”

“I’ll sit! the! dog! on you,” David aggressively grunts.

“Dress like what? Like a slob?”

“No. I think it was her nipples. You could see them through her tee shirt.”

“How were her nipples, anyway?” David bit at his fingernail, playing off his interest.

 

“There’s Andre, locked into the television again,” Divya says. Divya and my relationship works on the assumption that we’re constantly walking through a carnival, passing the time by pointing out amusing things to each other. So much so, it’s turned into a competition. Who can find the most amusing thing to watch together?

Right now, it’s Andre. He’s a part of The Administration, checking bags at another security gate in this terminal. On break as well, he’s watching CNN, C-Span, and MSNBC on a tripdych of screens surrounding him. It wasn’t always this way. Andre used to walk by each set of tv screens, and totally fucking distressed, groan, “What the fuck? Put the game on,” no matter what day it was. It’s like ‘the game’ became an abstract ideal that every actual game became a shadowed version of. Imagine, every game a part of some larger, perfect game, wherein the abstract realm, the only rule was that there are two sides.

Day after day, his disgruntled query to no one, “Put the game on!” One time, he happened to catch me and Divya looking over at him from our perches at Starbucks. I think he mistook it for concern, or involvement. The game he was referring to that day, he informed us, was the Big 12 championship game.

“Are you a TCU fan? I’m a Baylor fan.” I prodded him. Divya sent me a collusive, sidelong look. These glances made up the niceties of our contest, like the sharp clinking of bourgeoisie champagne glasses.

“No, no. I’m just really interested with the AP poll. Like how they’re weighing all these teams, setting them all in their order. It’s fascinating.”

“Oh. Interesting,” I said. Divya smiled wryly, but I was being sincere.

“So then, Andre,” Divya began, taking a deep, grandiose breath, “what’s better? The ranking system, or the new playoff system?”

The first day he actually stopped and stared at the screens, David and I were so dumbfounded we were compelled to observe him. Divya, grinning from twenty yards off, leaned up from her counter for a better view.

“How’s the game, Andre?”

“It’s great. This stuff, I mean, it’s great. I bet you two didn’t know that the direction of the entire country is at stake, did you?”

“Now, more than ever,” David said.

“The republicans just took over Congress and the Senate, and they’re liable to block anything from passing at all,” he was following the fast-moving lips of George Stephanopoulos, before they made a quick cut to Pat Buchanan, who braced for impact, before going on the offensive. The constitution, talking points, Benghazi, red zone, field position. “And now, Obama’s a lame duck, potentially.”

David and I didn’t know what to say.

“Man, I wish you could vote on this stuff.”

“You can,” I said, “Of course, you can.”

“Mmm, no. Andre’s right. The electoral fucking college.”

Still entrapped and glowing on this side of the screens, Andre responded dreamily, “Knew I should have gone to college.”

Looking at Andre now, you can tell he’s entrenched on one side or the other. I just haven’t bothered to ask him which. David, bored, puts the thing in reverse and silently backs away. I hear him peel out down a hall behind us.

“I wonder how he takes it all in?” Divya wonders aloud.

“Mmm. I don’t know.”

A man is presently at my elbow, going “Excuse me.” Out of all the TSA employees, informational boards and fellow passengers, he approaches me. “Excuse me, where are the United gates?”

“Down that way,” I point down the terminal in his original direction, and I wonder if my voice deliver on the promise of my pleasant face. I often feel pressured to come off a certain way. He walks off with a thankful nod.

I turn to Divya, “Why am I so innocuous to everyone?”

“Why, you’d rather be threatening?” she asks.

“Guess not.”

“Are you going to take the job?” she blurts, as if its been poised just under some surface during the entire conversation. She slouches more to lighten the effect.

The job,  more of a paid mentorship than a job offer, really, was to follow my dad into the charity host business.

My dad is built for the role, graced with skin conducive to fast, and healthy golden tans, never burning. No excess of sun can do it, I swear. No matter how long he’s outside in the sun, he seems to return with the same, even hue. He purposefully leaves an extra five pounds on, suggesting a comfortable life, without the stress of  intensive workouts. Assuming right away that I’d take him up on his offer, he suggested I add ten pounds of pure fat. “It’s natural,” he assured me, “this kind of fat would keep paleolithic humans warm and alive before we built shelters.”

My dad has a niche in the hosting business. He focuses on charity dinners, anywhere from 100 to a 100,000 dollars per plate. Even at fifty, he has ideas of grandeur. “If only I can break in to the 1,000,000 per plate game,” he often says, and jokes, “And I’ll let you pick up the scraps.”

He thinks I would be a natural. Aware of his own advantages, he quips, “If I have the skin for it, you have the countenance for it.” I can’t say he’s wrong. I can imagine myself doing the job well, being paid better than I am now, living in a better apartment than my dingy Somerville apartment, and adding ten pounds of seafood, steaks, and fine wine. At night, I see the poor kids who benefit from these charity dinners sitting next to the tables. I’m sure it isn’t a fair picture; can’t the excess of food be exploited to benefit those who are starving?

I had refused, by just not responding, to my dad’s offer about a month ago. At that time, Divya and I had gone on a few casual dates. I assumed I’d already told her I didn’t take the job, during one of our conversations at low-end Italian restaurants with average food in small portions. I lie to her, “Oh, it fell through.”

“Bummer,” she says. “It sounded like a great opportunity.”

Never came up, huh? during these dinner conversations. I guess it makes sense, we rarely spoke about each other, or even ourselves. Instead, between bites we jammed in amusing observations of the other diners in view. Divya conjectured on the various natures of the relationships behind my back, while I made wry remarks about the ‘getting laid’ odds of those who sat behind hers. “This a second date,” she said with an air of academia, like a sociologist, “they met at work. Potentially, a boss-employee relationship. He appears comfortably domineering. Don’t look now.”

“The male advances with a ‘wrist pet,’ a safe move,” I explained in my best ‘anthropologist,’ ‘safari guide’ vocals, “though the guarded nature of the female’s erect posture suggests they won’t be mating any time soon.”

Once we ran out of observations, as we certainly would, we ate faster, filling up our stomachs and the silence. We never explained our own narrative. What were we doing there, here? As the words came out, if they ever did, I imagine some implicit illusion would fade and we’d look at each other hopelessly, and push our food away.

We’d always go back to my place afterwards, each time via a different route for fresh terrain to observe, new material. “I wonder how many people have killed themselves in that liquor store,” she once said.

“The lighting is horrible, I wouldn’t blame them.”

In the apartment, Divya would go straight to the bed, make room for me, and then, when the mood was right, she’d open up my laptop, and go to straight to youtube. We followed a ceaseless stream of videos. Sometimes we searched for them, but more often, Divya and I pointed them out on the sidebar, a continual and systematic series of videos progressing logically, but without purpose or end.

We developed trends of favorite videos to watch. We obsessed over music videos of young rappers. There was something about the pageantry of their swag, and the impromptu spirit of unscripted gesturing, ambling down local streets that totally fascinated us. We talked about what it would be like to be standing on the opposite side of the street and watch their stylized walking and dancing towards the camera. Divya laughed excitedly, as she said, “Bobby Schmurda’s lyrics are so proudly violent, but seeing it filmed would ruin the entire effect. It would be so laughable, seeing all that ridiculous movement in the distance. And without music!”

Conversely (it seems to me) we liked watching clips, or entire episodes of the show, “Naked and Afraid.” In desolate, jungle locations, 21st century humans pretended to have to survive without clothes or technology. Yet, a camera captured it all. Neither of us could successfully articulate the enthrallment the show subjected us to, so we just lounged, watching wide-eyed, and knowing that the other already saw whatever we could potentially point out.

Wordlessly, we’d get it on as the final scenes of “Naked and Afraid” played. Maybe it was seeing other people naked, even with the blurs over their genitals. As the credits’ music ended, and the screen turned to black, we’d be facing each other instead, running our hands over the curves of each other’s bodies. When I’d turn her over onto her back, she’d instinctively reach over to the bedside table and grab a condom. She pretended to rip it open with her teeth, making an aggressive snarl, while her fingers tore the plastic covering. She wrapped me in a new latex skin. Sex with a condom and sex without a condom are categorically different for me, and I’m not just talking about the feeling. Condom sex clouds the original motivation, rendering it into an entirely new, antithetical experience. A pleasurable experience devoid of the evolutionary aspect that predicated its pleasure. That’s my working theory, at least.

Neither of us tried to make too much eye contact during sex. Instead, Divya would close hers and describe the feeling to me. Sometimes, I told her how funny it was to watch the headboard shake with each thrust. “I wish I could see it from up there,” she’d say, eyes closed.

Before we ever went out, we fucked at the Administration. I’d joked, “You’re bored, I’m lonely. Want to hook-up in the bathroom during my lunch break?” Ambiguously, she chortled, “Yeah, sure.” When the time came, she was waiting for me outside the single-stalled ‘family’ bathrooms. It smells like a hospital in there with all the sanitized surfaces for changing diapers.

Divya tells me, “I’m glad you’re staying. I know this place blows, but it’d blow so much worse for me if you left.”

That was the most romantic thing anyone had ever told me.

“What?” I say, “You’d be fine. You’d just strengthen your friendship with Doug.”

“God,” she laughs. “I’d kill myself first.”

“I don’t know why I don’t,” I say. I look at the clock, already knowing my break essentially over. “Aggh. I better go back now.”

“Want my pistol?” Divya says, pretending to reach for a gun beneath the register.

“Okay, Kevorkian.” I hear her laugh as I walk off.

Things are pretty slow back at The Administration. I walk back and forth, picking up plastic bins and carting them back to the front of the line. David’s replacement, Alex, is mid-thirties but doesn’t appear to know it. He splits his professional time between checking the monitor and swiping his iPhone screen left for matches and right to reject girls on Tinder.

During lulls he comes over to me and shows me his “tinder bitch squad,” and promises he’s wasting sperm in the squad’s specific orifices. Either that, or Alex is preaching to me about a pyramid scheme he swears isn’t a pyramid scheme, dressed up as a membership travel agency. “No, you’re getting it all wrong. You have your left side and right side. Next, you sign someone up on your left side, and one person on your right side. Then, they have their own left and right side, then down and down and down forever.” That’s one company that hardly disguises the fact it’s not selling a product. It’s selling inclusion. And exclusion. Their motto goes, “You should be here.” Alex swipes through pictures of himself and women in skimpy bikinis holding the motto emblazoned sign. I always give the same obligatory contemplative pause and a regrettable pass.

Doug leans back in his chair at the end of the line and sizes himself up. Out of everyone here, Doug is the only one who lives up to his position among the usually sarcastic moniker The Administration. He has the size for it at least. I’m looking at him differently now in long concentrated gazes. When before I’d interpreted his violent picking at his teeth and specifically randomly screening attractive women as quirky aggression, I now take at it as his passionate inclusion among The Administration. You could tell by the way he obsessed over that uniform, that badge, The Administration was his greatest assurance.

When the white kids march into black neighborhoods their first confrontation is truer than anything that follows it, seems to me, provoking the pranked to hit them, you know, before they produce the coupon for a ‘fade’ haircut, or the like, and God, I can’t barely fucking think with Tildy and Harold chattering. “Joan Rivers? Oh my God, I did know that. I just forgot,” Harold says, “Who else died this year?”

Tildy shrieks, “Robin Williams, of course! Um. Philip Seymour Hoffman.”

“Awful.”

“I know. Who else? Let’s see. Mickey Rooney.”

“Yeah, but he was old,” Harold says.

I ask Doug to cover me on the bins. He nods, “Gladly, my man.”

After heading to the bathroom, I take a loose shit, and predictably multitask by scrolling through Instagram. It smells especially bad today. It’s a strange color too. I quickly divert for a second from the gram to google, where I ask what the rare hue of my shit could potentially mean. WMD, but I’m too afraid to get lost in hypochondriac fantasies of imminent or slow deteriorating health. Worried, I zip over to an astrology mobile website. What’s a Taurus up to, nothing deadly? Clearly, I’m reaching for something…

Someone is hacking, gurgling, now spitting up vomit, I assume, in the stall next to me. Wonder how soon he’s dying, astrologically or internet-medically. Like a good American, I assume he has ebola.

Walking back from my bathroom break, I find Andre sneaking time to watch the screens. I want some informed sincerity, even if its mostly ignorant and entrenched. Coming up next to him, I ask, “How’s the politics game treating you?”

“Good.”

“Who do you think you’ll vote for in the next election?”

“Oh, I won’t be voting.”

“What?” I ask. “But you watch this stuff all the time?”

“Politicians in Washington are idiots. I’m above the partisanship.”

“Hmm. Why do you watch it then?”

“Why does anyone watch anything?” he says, almost aggressively. I take my cue to beat it.

It’s around 2:00 when they call in the bomb squad. Of course, I hear the code first through the staticky, faceless voice on the walkie, but it doesn’t really hit me until men in black wearing masks and sprightly dogs rush past our security checkpoint. The Explosive Ordnance Disposal team. I fear for my life. Five minutes later, I text Divya,  “Want to hook-up in the bathroom?”

With my nerves rattled, the work goes fast, and like a cut-away, it’s twenty-five minutes later, and I’m on break, briskly walking toward the bathroom. I knock on the ‘family’ bathroom door. Divya cracks the door, and I let myself inside. We immediately kiss, and I press my tongue in her mouth.

“Are you okay?” she asks, “You look like you’re in pain.”

I laugh it off. “Yeah, I’m fine. I guess I’m just taking it really seriously.”

As Divya throws her head back, laughing herself, I go for her polo. Her black hair wisps in separate strands of silk. She searches my face, and I’m onto her pants. “I’m so glad you stayed. I don’t know how I’d make it without you at this dump.” I finish taking her clothes off. “Like, who else would laugh at everyone with me?”

She stands before me, completely naked. We pet each other’s thighs, and hips. I ask her, “What happened? What’d they find?”

She grabs me by my hips and pulls my body into hers. I almost elbow her taking my shirt off.  “Only grenades.”

“Grenades? No way!”

“Only, like,” she elongates her words in a sultry tone, “five or six grenades.”

“Five or six. Jesus! How do you know this?”

“I heard they were in a small carry-on,” Divya kisses my collarbone, up my neck, covering me with her love, and to my ear. “I doubt they were live,” she whispers sensually, “Probably only duds.”

She unbuttons my pants, and takes off my briefs. I shake my pants off my legs. Funny thing, having to dance your pants off before engaging in the venerated act of sex. Solemnly, Divya remains at my knees, proceeds to go down on me.

“Come on. You don’t have to do this. Let me get you first, at least.”

“It’s fine, Jake. You can get me after.”

“I can’t let you do this,” I tell her, and contort my neck in an attempt to see her face, but there’s not enough room between me and the wall to get the angle. She pays me no heed, and so, trying to enjoy it, I look off over her now blurring dark shoulder into the blue and empty grey tiled bathroom wall. I have nothing to show her and she isn’t even looking.

I lean forward, like a spazz, and put my hand to her chin and pull up lightly. It’s just too reminiscent of Doug and his girlfriend.

There she is, a vibrant stereotype: Mexican features and hue, and a helplessly thin body and its cleaning uniform hanging like pealed off skin around her. Not her skin, per say, but a membrane.

She’s Indian. But she’s from Schenectady. New York. Suddenly, I’m gripped with a compulsion to pull her elbows toward me so that she’ll sit on my lap. I act on it, and here we are. I grip the fat of her butt as if I plan to sustain on it. My fingernails dig into her dark, rich brown skin with the fervor of survival. Her breasts swing into my face. The excess of life counteracts death. I want to believe so. Divya repositions her body so I find my way inside her. Even from above, she seems to raise her earnest brown eyes to me, appealing. I know, without looking in a blank screen, I wear the same expression like a uniform. Neither of us, on our opposite sides, could reassure the other.

Though I can tell my face is cast severely in orgasmic pleasurepain, for only a minute, I return, in mind, to the happier times of my life (perhaps it’s a response to pleasure, or something else…) in fields along the North Shore, and at the crest of a gentle hill, the separate planes, some the reddish-yellow hue of grain, others grassy green, all converged at gradual valleys, and then diverged into the horizon at angled surfaces. I’d stay out there, and try to observe every detail, secretly hoping my sensitive nature, this appreciation for beauty, would save me. Did I know I was going to die? I would have said, “Of course,” though somewhere inside my thoughts, somewhere more central, certainly pre-lingual, I’d sense I’d live forever…and Divya is riding up and down, and the sensation is different than all others…And if I didn’t happen to live forever, I’d make up for it by getting the most out of life, as if it were only a precaution for death. And even today, after sticking around this old, metal box for years, while planes perpetually lower to the ground like graceful caskets, I guard this same urgently comforting idea under alternating layers of fears and assurances…Carried away, or something, I don’t pull out in time.

I tell her I’ll pay for Plan B, this time, betraying the instinct after the fact. I dress quickly. I don’t confess that I’m lonely too, before walking back to The Administration. 

Doug pumps his fist as the ordinance team, and a whole host of security officials carry a man in his sixties to the airport holding cell. The man, stuttering incoherently, emitting tones, looks right past me, no begging here. The bomb-squad dog lurches towards his ankles, as his handler acknowledges Doug with a flippant salute. Hours after, he walks six inches taller, Doug does, tall enough to dunk.

I’m getting used to the simultaneously harsh and dim light on the line again, looking in the machinery’s grey reflection to see if its fearful apathy is fitting, like I’m adjusting my expectations, the screeches of magnificent airplane wheels like scraping silverware in an opposing dimension vaguely rising, not from the earth, but into the less conscious stratospheres of my mind, the basest of ones and zeros trickle slowly, and beyond! where gravity and sound are no longer at play, and molecules dissipate into nothing at all.