09-Aug-2008
LAYOVER – AMSTERDAM
Two boys, perhaps eight and ten, bury their heads across from each other into the thinly cushioned seats. They kick their feet into the air and rise up into headstands. They are facing each other upside down and laughing hysterically. Their mother sleeps two seats down from the blonde one, who might be older since his feet reach skyward a few inches further than his brown haired brother. Their thin, lithe bodies tremble under the exertion as their laughter diminishes to giggles. The younger one is having trouble remaining inverted. His brother, noticing, devises a strategy to keep his attention. He lifts one hand from the seat and digs blindly into the front pocket of his pants. After a moment, he pulls his hand free and attempts to toss something at his brother. Whatever he throws lands on the floor short of the seat. At first, I can’t tell what he is throwing, but after the older one repeats his digging and awkward pitching, I realize he’s tossing peanuts. The younger one holds his mouth open wide. His tongue hangs out, upward, defying gravity and almost touching his chin. A peanut hits him squarely in the nose. Like the Dunk the Clown game at the fair where you toss a ball at a target, the peanut seems to do just that. The boy collapses and rolls off the seat onto the floor.
I want to applaud. I want to reach in my own pocket and pull out a handful of peanuts or candy to encourage them to do more tricks. To put it mildly, I am desperate for any kind of diversion. It’s been nearly three hours. Still, I have more than four to go before my flight from Amsterdam to Accra. I’ve been up for twenty straight hours. The only thing I’m grateful about is that the Amsterdam airport has banned smoking. Two years ago on my way to read and lecture in Egypt, I spent seven hours waiting for my transfer flight to Cairo in a smoke-filled terminal. By the time I boarded the plane I had a hacking cough, and my eyes burned. Now, I am simply stuck in this sterile environment cut off completely from the world. A wall of windows displays the tarmac in one direction. A security checkpoint and a line of duty free shops hem me in on the side. It’s a corridor that makes you feel like you’re trapped in a fish tank on one side and a shopping mall on the other.
These two boys are the only diversion to rouse me out of my half stupor in at least ten hours. I feel like I’ve been in a state of suspended animation. My eyelids droop at half-mast and my tailbone aches. In ten minutes I will walk the terminal for the third time. My mind is focused on maintaining my stamina and keeping blood clots from forming in my legs. (I’ve taken a baby aspirin as a prophylactic against just that sort of complaint.) I cannot sleep so I drink coffee and try to stay awake. Thirty years ago I would have relished this state of exhaustion. It would have been a merit badge of my intrepid and adventurous self. At 48, I long for a full eight hours of sleep and fear how my body will rebel if I don’t get it. I no longer take pleasure in pushing myself to my limits. Perhaps, the most telling measure of this transition has been that I have gone from playing sports to “doing cardio.” I don’t think of exercising as fun or as a diversion. Instead, I worry about the health of my heart, my blood pressure and my cholesterol. My goal is to walk for a minimum of 90 minutes as I wait in the terminal for my flight to Ghana.
What I dream of, however, is that travel were more like Arthur C. Clarke imagined it would be in his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. Perversely, I yearn for the dulcet tones of Hal rousing me from my cryogenic sleep upon arrival at my destination. I am so tired at this point that I’m not even bothered by the fact that Hal had a darker, more deadly disposition. I just want someone to awaken me once the final leg of my trip is completed and damn the consequences.
I glance over one more time at the boys, but their performance is over. They are now subdued by Game Boys. I turn toward the wall of windows and look out at the tarmac and the jets taxiing back and forth. I try to imagine what it is like to be the least exotic fish watching a world beyond my grasp.
