The Blondes (15 page)

The blonde, feverish, made eye contact with us and I felt everything around me fade. From her nostrils and mouth, breath steamed the glass and spittle flecked it. The cop smacked her against the barrier again, as if for show, or maybe because her own adrenalin was up. Dinging the barrier was the flight attendant’s name tag.
Morgan
.

A sound crept through the Plexiglas—not a scream, more
of a moan. One of the baristas gripped my shoulder as if to pull me farther back, although we had already flattened ourselves against the sink.

Several security staff approached, and together they lifted the blonde and carried her away, enough of them that she could no longer struggle. “Watch that mouth doesn’t bite!” the take-down officer yelled.

Someone began reading the woman her rights. Then another officer shouted, “Save it, Burroughs! Her brain’s bleached. She can’t hear you.”

They were already inventing slang. I stared at the blood patch on the scratched plastic where the woman had been.

Inside the coffee area, one of the baristas started hiccuping and exclaimed something in Korean. The other barista asked, pointing, “Why?” I followed her gaze and saw that out in the gate zone, another of the blondes was rocking an empty security cart, her face flushed with effort, her brow furrowed with anger. There was no reason for her actions that we could see. No one had come near this woman and she had nothing to gain by concentrating on the act. Yet the cart flipped onto its side, then with another push, over it went. I felt a vibration through the floor up into my banged knee. That was when I looked down, aware for the first time of the throbbing; a trickle of blood had seeped through my jeans.

“You should go with them,” the barista who had screamed when I first came over the counter said to me. She pointed at a line of passengers who were being escorted, presumably to safety, by airport staff.

“I’m not leaving here.”

She started to say something about Starbucks regulations.

“You are hurt,” said the other. Her green apron had the name
Mae
pinned to it. With shaking hands Mae yanked several times at a first aid kit high on the wall beside the menu board.

I tried to wave her away, saying it was nothing.

Mae jumped up on the back counter and, kneeling there, pried the kit from the wall. When she got it open, she dug out scissors and bandages. She insisted I sit down on a stepping stool, then rolled up my pant leg and swiped at my knee with cotton and peroxide. My eyes watered and I bit my lip. The other girl got on the phone with someone, maybe a manager, to try to find out what they were supposed to do. Her one-sided conversation came to me in snatches, like something on the radio. As soon as the peroxide cleared it became apparent my knee was worse than I’d thought. A good chunk of skin had been gouged out, and the joint was quickly swelling.

From where I was sitting, the counter blocked my view of the rest of the airport. I could only just make out events occurring above it. There was a marble-green line of laminate separating us from them, and even now I’m grateful it was there. We could hear shouts. The final two blondes were being violently subdued.

“Where were you going?” Mae asked as she poured iodine on a swab.

“Canada,” I told her.

“I hate to say, but you may not get to Canada today. They will keep you here. I think so.”

She was young with flinty eyes, her black hair pulled back in a butterfly clip. I remember her hands were still shaking. It occurs to me now that taking care of me calmed her, and maybe I knew it then too, because I let her.

The other barista was on the phone again, speaking in Korean this time.

Mae tried to tell me I needed stitches but couldn’t find the word. “You need …” she said, and made a sewing motion with her hand.

I assured her I was okay, but she took scissors and clipped several lengths of medical tape, which she kept hanging from individual fingers before retrieving a clean white gauze pad from its package with her other hand. The colour of membrane, the lengths of tape hung and fluttered. Mae had a brave face but she continued to shake. She called me an athlete for being able to jump the counter.

“What’s going on out there?” I asked her.

Mae glanced over her shoulder. I could make out the blue backs of security officers standing in a circle, their heads bent down, one speaking directly into a walkie-talkie, and I knew—dead, or alive but Tasered—they must have had the blondes on the floor.

Mae turned and lurched over my shoulder, vomiting into the sink.

When the area had been secured, an officer in a face mask came over and rapped on our window. We were drinking
coffee, which felt wrong, as though we were charmed housewives at a bridge game, sipping and standing around speculating on what would happen while health officials sealed off the gates and EMS workers removed the four covered bodies and a dozen injured travellers. But we were wobbly. Mae and the other barista, Kate, and I had reasoned we should have something to steady our nerves, especially since we had no idea when we’d have the chance again. Mae was very focused and clear-headed that way. Kate was nibbling on a biscotti when the officer knocked, and she jumped. The biscotti crumbled, half of it falling to the floor.

“Stop what you’re doing,” the officer said, the words muffled through her face mask.

Mae took another sip.

“Stop!” the officer commanded, and gestured for her to put down the coffee.

“They think it’s … it’s contaminated,” I stammered.

We looked down at our cups.

We were led out, and right away the coffee stand was sealed behind us. The security officers were fewer now, intent on escorting the remaining employees and passengers. Emergency workers in bloated yellow hazmat suits moved into the gates, circling and pointing, like astronauts discovering the moon for the first time. Once past the newly erected, vacuum-sealed plastic sheeting we could see these figures floating, ghostly. I was forced to leave behind my shoulder bag with all my identification, laptop, and cellphone. It was still sitting at the base of the counter, where I’d set it down or dropped it before
jumping over. The blood patch on the barrier was just a few feet above it.

We were taken out an exit to a trolley already packed with wide-eyed, silent people, and trundled across a flight strip, where we were isolated in an aircraft hangar. On the way over, I watched a young boy playing a pocket video game. His small thumbs tapped across the mute buttons, and he frightened me with his concentration, his ability to meditate on something else. Beside him, his mother was gaping at something over my head. I turned and looked but there was nothing but a bank of grey clouds.

We were met with clipboards, then handed questionnaires and pens. The questions asked if we had come into contact with blood or saliva. How close had we been to an infected person? Had we touched or been touched by an infected person? Did we have any injuries? Did we feel any signs of illness? I wondered if it was a standard form or if it had been written and copied that day, specifically for our situation. We had to write down our names and addresses, where we were going and coming from, our birthdates and Social Security numbers, the names of our closest relatives, any medications we were taking. We were told that the welfare of the country depended on our honesty.

As at any airport, our luggage showed up an hour and a half later. It took ten minutes for the armed guards by the mammoth doors to open them, or perhaps decide to open them. We could hear them orchestrating that process while
someone else collected our checked and X’ed boxes. Finally, a man in a see-through suit towed the luggage in on a string of carts. He got out and began unloading our things into a pile, none too delicately. When he had unloaded half of it, someone approached the suited man, touched his shoulder, and gestured for him to leave the carts and get out. He unhitched the final carts from the back of his vehicle, so that half the things lay in a heap and half sat neatly on the skid, then he drove out the way he’d come.

Someone shouted through a bullhorn that we would be permitted to claim our personal items. Most of the carry-ons looked the same, grey or black with zippers and wheels. People walked over and dug through them or climbed onto the stillbundled carts to pick up cases that did not belong to them, sometimes opening them up and re-zipping them, before finding the pieces they had arrived with.

I found my laptop bag under a hard-shelled orange plastic carry-on. My wallet and cellphone were still there, but the computer, when I tried to turn it on, flickered and brought up only a dark grey screen. I couldn’t say whether it was because of my own treatment of it at the coffee stand, because of the man who had unloaded it, or because of another traveller desperately searching for his own bag, throwing others aside without regard.

Not everyone had cellphones, and near me a senior-citizen couple in retirement pastels were asking a face-masked official if we would be allowed to make phone calls.

“Whoever you need to reach already knows you’re going to be late,” the official said. “We’re world news.”

When they pressed her, saying that was exactly why they needed to call—to let their daughter know they were all right—the official became stony and said she couldn’t make any promises about communications. After she moved away, I extended my cellphone and told the couple they could use it if they kept the call short. They thanked me profusely but in the end couldn’t get reception. Someone a few feet from us looked over and said that too many people were trying to phone at once. The airwaves were jammed. The couple passed my cell back to me. I tried Larissa and my mom—both had known I was flying—but the phone just said
Searching
 …

The day moved in sluggish waves. When we’d first arrived, some people were crying and rocking, covering each other’s shoulders with jackets. As the morning wore on, those people resigned themselves while others who had held it together began to break down. Several teenage girls with smudged mascara were leaning back to back in pairs, providing a brace for each other while sharing earbuds. Japanese businessmen—five or six of them—crouched together in a circle, weight on the balls of their feet, hands hanging between their black-suited knees. They were facing one another, as if they were having a board meeting, though none of them spoke. Some people had neck-support pillows and were resting against them along the walls; every once in a while someone would take his pillow over to someone else who seemed to be breaking down and in greater need. Although it wasn’t comfortable, people stretched out on the concrete. A few security officers engaged in crowd control. When a guy tried to urinate in the corner, they
grabbed him and stood talking to him with puffed-out chests. The message:
Sit down and hold it
.

Other security officers, many of whom had been caught in the fray, lounged together on the ground at one end of the hangar. They’d been put at risk now too, I guess. They had coffee, which they were sipping from Styrofoam cups. They had a whole urn between them, and a few people drifted over in that direction like seagulls toward a picnic. When they came back again—to sit down on their suitcases or against the wall—they were empty-handed. It wasn’t long, though, before people began complaining and arguing. Some minor yelling matches broke out here and there: people smacked the backs of their hands and wanted to know about reimbursement. As the din rose, a woman with a bullhorn shouted that food had been generously donated to us by a pizza chain. It would arrive in an hour or so. It was eleven in the morning, and we had been in quarantine for almost three hours.

“We’re doing our best here, people!” the bullhorn-woman informed us brusquely.

A handsome Indian man, who looked a little like Larissa’s husband, Jay, approached her and we could see them having a serious conversation. They went back and forth, then she nodded and lifted the horn to her mouth again. It was likely some of the food would be vegetarian, she declared, and she expected there would be milk and juice for the children, as well as soda, but of course she had no idea of quantities. Children would be fed first. She asked that those who did not have dietary restrictions leave the vegetarian portions for those
who did. Another woman came and took the horn from her and gave the same speech in Spanish, halting here or there, the button on the horn giving her trouble. It felt like a sombre, official potluck party.

Again, we waited.

Eventually a woman with a drill sergeant’s bellow read out a list of names, mine among them. Reluctantly I left Mae and Kate, who were slumped together holding hands, Kate with her eyes closed. I had noticed that officials were occasionally making rounds with our forms and taking people away to the other end of the hangar. Now I hobbled after the other injured parties to a makeshift station where those who needed medical attention could get it. It was essentially a group of clean sleeping bags covered in paper sheeting and spread on the ground in front of an ambulance. I was ranked as low priority. I stood at the line’s end on my bad knee, shifting my laptop bag around on my shoulder, and wishing I’d left it with Mae and Kate. High priority was clearly in the ambulance. I stood for a long time before I was allowed to move up to a “waiting seat” on a sleeping bag.

When it was my turn, the medic undid Mae’s handiwork and briskly cleaned my knee. Behind a pair of protective glasses, her eyes were a watery blue, and beneath them were pouches like pockets. Like everyone I saw that week, she had a skin tone that didn’t match her hair. It was fire-engine red, and I wondered if her pharmacy had run out of brown.

Through her paper mask the medic told me to brace myself. I was in for six stitches.

The woman next to me was having her fingers splinted. She had broken two knuckles trying to close another woman out of the bathroom stall where she had been hiding. She didn’t even seem embarrassed about it.

My medic commented that a number of the injuries were crowd-related. The broken-knuckle lady said she’d heard rumours of two trample victims. I told her I’d seen them carried out.