At JFK Airport in a plastic seat in a row of connected
plastic seats in tired cavernous Terminal 4, staying out of the way of rude
skycaps pushing wheel chairs, Hispanic couples with screaming babies, tall sets
of thin hard young women looking to be attended and discovered by little men
with paper signs scrawled with last names, plump girls with backpacks reading
IPads, aged Chinese couples, I was seated beside a handsome top-heavy lad (he
had a big head with a big cap, he had a booming chest but thin tapered legs)
who asked me if I knew what that plant was, pointing to the window looking out
on the parking lot and distant Queens. I looked around for an indoor cactus, a
tall bamboo or a dancing lady in a stone vase, but only saw a design on the plastic
window shades with a repeating pattern that reminded me of a marijuana leaf. “That plant out there,” he
pointed further. A factory in the distance, smoke spewing out of fat buildings
within the airport grounds. The air in the terminal was dry to my eyes which
were burning and grey with artificial light that extracted the beauty out of
every face around me, every bored spinning pacing tepid waiting group of
passenger greeters, every dragging disappointed awkward overdrawn individual
and couple arriving from Belize and San Jose and Israel and Marco Island and Port au
Prince. The young man’s face, so near, had not yet lost hope, but perhaps he
was bored just sitting there lost or waiting, removing himself from becoming
one with the aimlessness, airlessness around him by jotting notes in a pad and generally
worrying about the heavy whiteness in the sky beyond that may be a foreboding of a
poisonous future.
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