Eleven

Airports

Brothers, sisters, where are you now, as I look for you right through the crowd – Belfast Child, Simple Minds

All these people, I watch them walking across the wide empty spaces. Here, from the white skeleton beams of one air port, or the next, here I am searching the queues for your face. I am a mother waiting to see her son in a busy and crowded hall. I have waited for you here for a long time, and one day your face is one of the many that move through these corridors.
You look bewildered, and tired, and you carry a box bigger than a door. In your bags, fresh snow melts off gloves that I suppose you hurriedly squashed in amongst a Lonely Planet and a bicycle pump.

There are so many air ports. Did you ever stop to think about how many? Do you even remember the first one, when I carried you over the runway and held your hand for the rest of our journey to our hotel, on that far away Indian Ocean island of Mauritius.
You have nightmares on the plane. You scream in your sleep, and kick your strong legs into the chair in front of us, making the man squirm and gasp and wag his finger at you. Do you remember?

And the bad dreams did not stop there. You have dreams far from home, and in places that seem like dreams. Each time, you have been forced awake by fingers snapping under your nose. You woke to ask, which city were you flying towards?
Not even the sound of the sea, plushing open the curtains, could soothe you back to sleep on those nights. In all these beds you twitch and shake at the prospect of being borne by wings that you did not choose. And each time you awaken, to find walls and not wings, the relief sweeps freshness over you.

Do you remember being moved you to tears when you found yourself far from those shores, and not headed to them. Your bed was not flying anywhere. You'd woken up and found yourself not on an airplane, not headed to where your heartbreak started, not anywhere near that dark haired person who, you thought, engineered your glory and then set you on a dark downward plunge into brokenness and unhappiness. Your ship sank to the bottom of the sea, your beautiful ship, and it seemed that every trip to an airport dislodged it, brought back that dark haired ghost, made the sludge fly in black plumes of smoke and doubt.

Or was it me, behind those screens? Was it me that you'd shouldered out of your mind, that slipped through the cracks of your virtual insanity?

And then you find a pillow that gives you a full night's sleep. Your dreams of being lost and airborne give way to dreams of running, or protracted discussions.
Your twitching turns to frowning, and sometimes laughter.
Sometimes your fingers forget, and the bunched up sheets unwind beyond your flowering fingers.
And soon the work is done, some money is saved, and places explored. It is time to be somewhere else.

A notebook computer swings from your shoulder, or a thick book, or a bottle of wine. Where will you fly to next?

Yes I saw you run out and stand small on the big square of lawn, and turn your bright eyes up to the bowl, to the silver splinter scrawling a thickening white chalk across the sky.
It was the sound, and the speed, and the mystery that excited you. It seemed to you that only the bravest and deepest people would go out and explore, and you wanted to be one of them.

And here you are, in another giant hall of light and beams and bright colors checkering off walls and floors and ceilings.
Can you hear the chants, and the cries, of the people, the grandfather’s who fostered these families? Can you see them in their fields with their swords? It was not so long ago, and the swords of the sky, will soon be a difficult memory to conjure up too.

They are outside, these machines. But what you don’t see are the trucks that shoot off the moment they land, and the pipes, and the orange blood that plunges into those empty wings.

All you see are the trails that fill the sky. That is all that remains of the tons and tons of liquid fuel that each of these machines drink for every flight.
I watch them from here for a long time. I watch all of you inside these terminal buildings, and I watch these terminal machines take off, and return.

I sometimes creep with them in the empty vaults of the jetstream. I walk slowly with them as they trespass the planet’s sanctums, leaving their bad breath behind them, while children sleep and adults drive digits into small rubber buttons, and stare into small screens.
I try to listen and feel the urgent wings of metal scrub the air, and I stoop on the ground, like the Pope, kissing the tar where tyres skid and screech, leaving lines of decaying rubber. I walk behind their still warm bodies, and see them aligning their ailerons like fish in a small bowl, one beside another, as more flocks approach.
Did you think your grandchildren would fly as you have done? Did you think that your father was right? That you would go for holidays on the moon?

All of these things are possible, but not all the people who live around you are innocent. And they hold these dreams out of your reach, and out of the reach of the many like you.

I wish you knew and could have seen, what we, the dead have seen. The dead do not suffer some of those who live, to pass through this world, unattended. If you had seen what they have done in history, their families, and what they conspire to do today, these people would not live to wake up in their beds.
If you knew how they trap you, and steal from you, and murder and manipulate the fortunes of the whole world, in order that they may pour more millions into their accounts, if you knew, you would not let a single one of them go unpunished. You would not let up your guard for a single moment.

They are a den of vipers, let loose in the world. And if you do not believe that some men are evil, that they can enslave whole nations, you will. They are guided by a terrible greed that consumes them. A contempt for the poor and all who are weaker than they are. They are proud and strong and their hunger for power, are likes maggots feeding on the living planet, turning its tissues into a carcass.
If you knew that they have downloaded all your futures, into their own temporary files.
If you knew how cunning and devious and powerful these people are.
If only you know how few have controlled so many, how so few have devised schemes that drive nations to war.
If only you knew.

But you will know soon. You will know that something has gone horribly wrong. But will you ever find out why? Will you ever find out who? Will you ever learn how these bankers and moneychangers control everything through their control of money? Will you and this world know any of this in time, or will the wealth of the many once again be seized by the few, plunging the world into darkness, into riots and ruins?

I see even these old men, walking through these ports, with their minions. They bring with them a great darkness, and I fear to tread close to them. I feel my sails whither. I feel the joy of the world sucked into their evil wrinkles, their pointed hands.
They have shrewd calculations in their briefcases. If only you knew what they will do, and how they will do it.

I remember that glint in your eye when you were a small boy. I remember the model plane we gave you, with its red plastic body, and blue and yellow wings. You swung it around you like a giant butterfly, while the elastic inside its hollow throat unwound, making the yellow propeller quack like a duck.
The bellies of the birds beyond the glistening terminals fly fat people to faraway holidays. And young people to jobs and island parties.

I watch all these people. They are your brothers and sisters, but they are not mine. When I walked the Earth that you now walk, I chose for my inspiration the fading trees, and the gray company of owls and books and songs. But you are still here, and I see the things you do with great dismay. And the things you leave undone, with great dismay.

Now I am just a ghost, and though I once fixed my Earthbound eyes on all the dark and gloomy trails, from here there is a different view. There is so much to see and to know.
It all flows through me, like atomic energy blossoming inside of me.
When you have floated above the Earth, as I have, when you move through the tin foil suits of astronauts, in the liquid clear and wet world, it is easy to see the fate that awaits you and these maddening crowds.
The wisps that turn and sweep over the continents now snake with thicker coils, and the white in them, begins to shine with silver, and even the silver, grows black crystals of venom that will drench your cities.

You see, in a short time from now, these ports of the air will close, and the lines, the airlines, will not stretch so far. But it will not be the winds that have forced the silver wings to rust over the growing green grass, and the cracked airway strips.

It is the faraway salvos over drops of oil, and even in the guts of the machines sent to war, the oil will spill like black blood and finally run out.
The sleek silver machines outside, that roar and bellow, will be quiet, and derelict as tornados whirl and blast overhead in their stead.
For some this may be good news, as the skies at last will blue-en, the clouds will cauliflower in caspers and cottonwool, as bright and splendid again.
Oh you have no idea of the scope of it all.

There is just the mob, and you are among them, walking through the terminal.