Long empty stretch of walkway, all to myself. Single hand-gel dispenser erect at the middle almost an accident of modern art. Sideways the space has been stanchioned off and desks await with forms and pens and more hand-gel. The airport is turning itself inside-out and municipal, a place where you hand over yourself to the authorities. At baggage drop the clerk had watched me snake through the queue barrier and dump the monolith on the scale, then went passport? boarding pass? QR code? I collected myself, I’d come in rushing and must got thrown off — it’s not every day there is a barrier but no queue.
I buy a can of coke and balance it on the off-limits seat next to me. Felt the pull of the last copy of Cosmopolis on the shelves, too. Maybe that was the right buy — the airport price, the movie cover, the pages inside addressing banality in so many clever ways. I regard the empty seat, that every other lounge seat barred from use with a wide strip of safety belt textile. Like the QR code, this is a new ask, a new signifier of security. It sags diagonally like the prohibiting line over the stick figure it displays. The phantom traveler.
Later I spy a couple kissing mask-on-mask through the split of seats window and middle. The lady in front makes the requisite conversation, wants to know what every cabin announcement is about. I listen to her while looking back at the paragraphs I wrote back at the lounge. The_______________empty____________spaces___________ had ____________meant _____________a______________ territory __________________of ____observation ________________to be staked __________out, _____________and words ___had __been __________________corralled _____________around
some
form
of
beauty
. The________empty_________space_______________had______matched_____
the
empty
page
— is ———————this ——————–writing? ———————
Then she tells her daughter on the phone about me and I crack up. I listen to her through the split of empty seats. I’m a journalist, my daughter is starting out in Budapest. Call if need be in Athens.
the Budafoki amended 