Peripheral Visions: Gate 558

Peripheral Visions: They coalesce in the soft blur of darkest shadows and take shape in the corner of your eye. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late.

Gate 558

Frank had lost track of time, but at least he knew he was at the right place.

"Gate 558," he muttered. Then, a few seconds later: "Gate 558." He looked up at the number, glowing yellow on the wall:

GATE 558

"This must be the place," he said.

He looked at his hands. He stared at the floor. Doubts began to assail him.

"Gate 558," he muttered again. "Gate 558."

Blowing out a breath and sitting up straight, he chided himself for being obsessive. He focused instead on stretching his back, which felt sore from sitting on the hard bench.

It was actually more like a couch than a bench, though not at all a soft couch. Moreover, there were armrests dividing each spot so that no one could stretch out for a nap. That, Frank thought, was pure cruelty when the connecting flight was this late at night... no, make that early in the morning... and the layover was so many hours.

He barely even remembered the flight that had brought him here from Baltimore. He'd watched two... three?... movies, all stupid and tinny-sounding through the crappy headset that had the airline had provided. There had been a dinner, too – no better than a TV dinner, some kind of meatloaf and potatoes dish with a side salad that wasn't a salad at all but some sort of beady, mushy pasta. He'd taken it to be sweet corn until he took a bite; then he didn't take it at all, but rather set it to the side, disgusted.

Bad food, bad movies. Why do I do this to myself? he wondered.

He stared at the floor. He examined his hands. His skin looked dry; his veins were more prominent than he remembered, blue and wrapped uneasily around knobby bones. His hands looked old.

But, no: Frank blinked, and the illusion vanished. His hands look normal again, neither young nor old, much as Frank typically felt.

Young enough to still want to see new places, he thought. Old enough to know better.

His gaze went back to the yellow letters on the wall.

GATE 558

Impulsively, suddenly flooded with doubt, he dug out his boarding pass. It looked strange; he couldn't make sense of it, except to see his name. Numbers crowed the document, looking random and not registering in his brain. What he thought at first was the flight number was, he decided, the boarding time... no, that still didn't seem right. Maybe it was the booking code? The ticket number?

But he did recognize the gate number – 558 – and that reassured him. Then, nagged by uncertainty all over again, he looked back at the letters on the wall:

GATE 558

Frank shook his head. "Maniac," he accused himself. No one else was acting worried. No one else even seemed impatient, and they had all been waiting as long as he had for the flight... or even some word on the flight. Was it delayed? Was it on time? Was it departing at all?

A new doubt picked at his mind: Had all these people been here with him the whole time? Frank furtively looked around. There was a clutch of older women bunched at one end of one of the uncomfortable couch-type benches. They seemed to be talking excitedly among themselves and having a gay old time. Frank envied them their energy and enthusiasm, but he couldn't say for sure whether he had noticed them earlier.

Then there was the somber couple, also older, that sat apart from everyone else, in a corner of the room that seemed to be less brightly lit. He had definitely noticed them before; they looked too stern, too much like the dour farmer and his wife from the famous painting with the pitchfork, for him not to have pegged them with a sarcastic thought: They looked like midcentury America – middle of last century, that was.

Then there was the kid sitting on the bench just across from Frank. He looked to be sixteen or seventeen; he had blond hair, pimples, a hooded sweatshirt (pink, of course; all the teenagers seemed to like pink these days), and yellow board shorts. He also had a hand stuck down those shorts, in an odd, inappropriate display of... what? Cool? Casualness?

Frank thought about his grandfather's stories of how young men in his day had worn trousers that slipped down far enough to reveal a good portion of their undershorts. Some people mentioned that trend, which had lasted decades, when they commented on this behavior among the younger set. Frank's father said that when he was in his teens and twenties everyone made a show of being bisexual, or at least open to bisexual experiences. "Every generation needs its own way to rebel," Frank's father had said when this disgusting display of young men with their hands down their pants had become commonplace. He had been an understanding old man, rest his soul. He'd have been a good grandfather, if Frank and his husband had ever had children.

Frank wasn't so sure he could simply write off such vulgar conduct as rebellion, though. His own generation had never been so obnoxious when they were young men; their rebellion had taken such a subtle form that Franks wasn't sure what it had been, or if it had manifested at all.

Frank considered reprimanding the youngster – not in a loud, abrasive way; maybe just whispering to get his attention and then pointing at his inappropriately-placed hand. But the teen had adopted the universal posture of all teenage boys everywhere: He was slouched in his seat, eyes closed, with pods jammed into his ears. His lips moved slightly as though he were singing along.

Frank rolled his eyes, but did nothing; no one else seemed to care, so maybe he shouldn't, either.

He continued his cataloguing of the others in the gate area. There was a young woman with a toddler and a newborn; from time to time one or the other of the babies... or both, dear gods... would set up a fuss, and then the gate area would be filled with the shrieking of infants for at least half an hour. That had happened... four times already? Six? This was another display Frank found unconscionable; there was a reason he and his husband had never had children, after all, and though he'd never put it into words so bluntly, Frank simply didn't like kids. They were noisy and chaotic, and even when he'd been a child himself he'd much preferred the company of adults.

I'm pretty sure I've seen them all before, Frank decided, having completed his survey of the other passengers.

Then he took that back: A new player had entered the drama of Gate 558, a red-haired man with creamy, lightly freckled skin. And he was showing far too much of it.

Frank shook his head, unable to accept what he was seeing: The man strolled into the gate area as casually as could be, and began stripping off his clothes. Dropping the last of his garments to the floor, the man unrolled a straw mat with a flick of his hand – Frank hadn't even noticed the straw mat, he was so confounded – and then lay down on his stomach, completely nude.

Frank looked around. No one seemed to mind the newcomer's appalling display, or even to have noticed.

Frank wrestled with reluctance at being the first to object. Finally, he decided he couldn't simply sit still; this was too much. Screaming brats were one thing... even vulgar teens were one thing... but this was something well beyond the pale.

Frank got up from the bench and made his way across the waiting area. Standing over the naked man, he said, "Excuse me, sir."

The naked man didn't seem to have heard him.

"Sir, excuse me," Frank repeated.

The man moved an arm, and Frank thought he was going to roll over, look up, and acknowledge him – but all the man did was scratch cursorily at one creamy white buttock. Then the arm relaxed at his side once more.

Frank squatted down next to him. Vaguely he wondered at the lack of pain in his knees, which had been feeling creaky in recent years.

"Young man!" he insisted, putting a hand on the naked man's shoulder.

Suddenly, Frank felt hot sun on his bare head. He squinted against the glare of a summer afternoon. Looking around, Frank saw a flawless blue sky; glancing at the sound of crashing waves, he saw a placid blue expanse of ocean stretching off to a horizon over which distant cumulus clouds sailed, rumpled and majestic, looking dreamlike across miles.

Frank was so startled it took him a moment to realize the naked man was protesting.

"Don't be touching on me, man!" the man said angrily.

"What?" Frank took his hand away from the man's white, well-defined shoulder.

Now the man did roll halfway over and look at Frank. "What's your deal? You don't just go touching people like that. And you're in my light. Move!"

"I..." Frank stared down at him, too astonished to know how to respond. Then: "Well, look, I'm sorry, but you're... you're naked."

"So? This is a naturist beach. Or did you not know that?"

"I..." Frank had no idea how to even begin explaining that a moment ago he – and the naked man, too – had been in a public space that was definitely not "naturist" in... well... nature. Instead, he said, "Where are we, exactly?"

"Harrison Beach," the man told him. Frank had no idea where that was, and he didn't think he wanted to ask.

"And you're still in my light," the naked man said.

Frank took a step backward...

...and found himself in the same dreary gate area he'd been before. The naked man was still stretched out before him, face down and without a stitch of clothing to cover him.

It wasn't right, and it didn't make sense, but Frank had no idea what to do about it, especially since no one else seemed to notice. He walked slowly back to the bench where he'd been sitting before. Taking to his perch once again, he tried to process what had just happened. He'd been transported to a completely different place... somewhere around the curve of the globe, obviously, because it had been afternoon, and not the middle of the night as it as here, at this gate, at the airport in...

In...

"Well, this really does prove I'm dreaming or else sliding into dementia," Frank mumbled to himself. He had no idea where he was, or where he was headed.

But he still remembered he'd come here from Baltimore. Or had he?

Frank looked around the area once again, his eyes skipping from the older women to the weary elderly couple to the tired-looking mother with her two young children, and then to the teen who, like the naked man... the sunbather, Frank thought ... was behaving inappropriately, with no shame or self-consciousness about it.

Or was he behaving inappropriately? Somehow, the naked man was both here and someplace different; what was more, he seemed to have no idea that he was here at all. Was that true of the teenager as well? Or was the teen just being a callous (or was it callow?) youth, disregarding the expectations of polite society?

Frank considered the question. He supposed it could be said that teens were all in their own world in any case, but this seemed an extreme possibility. And how would he ever know?

He wouldn't, unless... unless he put himself into the teenager's space the way he'd done with the naked man. Somehow, Frank thought, putting his hand on the naked man's shoulder hadn't just put him into the man's personal space, it had put him into the man's headspace as well... put him into the same place where the man thought himself to be.

An absurd idea, a ridiculous flight of fancy into the realm of fantasy and magical thinking. And yet, something strange had happened. Frank had never used drugs and wasn't having flashbacks; he wasn't so tired or so old that he was likely to be having hallucinations.

"When you want to test your theory," he muttered to himself, "try, try again."

Frank got up, crossed to the bench where the teenage slumped, sat down beside him, and then put a hand on the teen's pink-hoodie-clad shoulder.

Instantly, he smelled fresh green grass, heard the cries of young people nearby, and registered clattering noises that seemed to be tied to the exultant exclamations.

The teenager's reaction was similar to that of the naked man: He lurched away, his eyes snapping open and fixing Frank with a hostile glare. "Whoa, whoa!" the teen barked.

"I'm sorry," Frank said, holding his hands up in surrender.

"What the fuck, man?"

"Please pardon me," Frank said.

"You go around touching on boys a lot, old man?"

"Please forgive me, but – "

"I'm a minor, you asshole!" the kid shouted at him. "I could get you in so much trouble!"

"Can you please stop screaming?" Frank asked. Then, realizing the teen couldn't hear him through the music on his ear pods, he gestured at his own ear. "And maybe take those out so we can talk for a minute?"

The teen reached up and yanked a pod out of one ear. "What's that? What are you saying?"

"I said please pardon me, but..." Frank hesitated. What was he going to say now? That he and the teen were sitting in an airport terminal, waiting for a flight, even though... Frank looked around... even though, at the very same time, it was obviously a summer day in a public park?

A skateboarding park at that, he realized, as the clattering and shouts of excitement continued. Frank glanced over at the sounds, and saw a drove of teens – all looking much like the kid he was talking to, with pastel-colored hoodies and brightly-hued shorts – riding their skateboards around on curving concrete surfaces.

"You trying to pick me up or something?"

"For God's sake!" Frank said angrily.

The teen suddenly had a calculating look. "Listen, man, I'm not gay. But if you're paying..."

"What?" Frank asked, aghast.

"I mean, a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks."

Frank stared at the kid.

"Well?" the kid said.

"You know what," Frank said. "Never mind." He got to his feet and stepped away from the teenager. As before, his surroundings changed abruptly; the summer day was gone, replaced by the cold light of overhear fluorescents and the cold middle-of-the-night atmosphere of the gate.

The kid looked around, seeming puzzled. Had Frank vanished from his sight? The kid's eyes fixed on Frank for a moment, making him think that the kid could still see him, but then the kid shrugged, stuffed the pod back into his ear, and shut his eyes again.

Shaken, Frank retreated to his own bench. Clearly, he thought, the people around him thought they were in other places, and not at an airport gate at all. But – did that mean he, himself, was correct in thinking that he and the others were sitting at...

Frank glanced up again at the numbers on the wall.

GATE 558

This was insane, he told himself. How could they all be here, gathered in the very same space, and yet also be immersed in their own private worlds?

His two interactions with the others at the gate made him hesitate to try a third time, but as minutes dragged past and the mystery ate at him, Frank finally decided to approach the older couple in the dark corner of the room. Maybe he didn't need to actually touch them; maybe if he came close enough, if he insinuated himself into their space, that would be enough. After all, he had remained at the nudist beach and in the skateboarding park even after he'd removed his hand from shoulder of the naked man and, after him, the vulgar teen.

Frank got up and gingerly made his way toward the older couple. They both sat rigidly still, looking grim and disapproving. Could they see him already? But their eyes never wavered; they stared straight ahead.

There was an empty seat next to the older man. Frank sat down in it, then leaned forward. In a quiet, almost intimate voice, conscious that he might startle the pair, he said, "Good evening..."

The two took no notice of him.

Frank sat still, reassessing. Maybe in order to break into their private universe he would need to touch them after all?

But then a soft, subtle shift stole over the room around them. The gate, with its windows looking out over the tarmac and the planes and the black night sky, shifted into a place that seemed very similar, and yet was markedly different. Benches were still scattered across a sprawling space, but now there were more people, most of them walking around, hauling backpacks or soft-sided luggage; a few dragged wheeled suitcases or even trunks.

A voice announced something indecipherable on a PA system, the words distorted. Another room seemed to have opened up across the way, full of lockers. Frank glanced to the side and saw vending machines – including what looked like machines designed to dispense tickets.

Not an airport gate, he realized. A bus station.

Frank looked back at the older man, and saw that his sharp, disapproving gaze now rested on him. "Ain't got money for you," the older man said, his tone unfriendly.

"What?"

"You heard. I don't give money to tramps."

"I'm not a tramp," Frank said.

"Arthur," the older woman said, tugging on her husband's arm. "Now, he didn't ask for money, did he?"

"It's a sure thing he's about to," the older man – Arthur – told her.

"I am not," Frank said.

"Maybe he just needs to ask the time," the older woman said. "Or to ask how to work those ticket machines. I couldn't figure it out myself. Why don't they have people selling tickets at counters anymore?"

Frank tried to gather his thoughts. "I'm so sorry to bother you," he said, "But I... I just got off a bus but I think I'm at the wrong station. I couldn't quite work out where I am..."

"St. Louis," the older man said.

"We're on our way to see my sister in Pennsylvania," the older woman nodded, smiling at Frank.

"I... I see," Frank said. "And you never travel by air?"

The older man's look had turned to suspicion. "Are you taking a survey? Selling something?"

"I – no," Frank said. "I was just..."

"Too drunk to know where you are," the older man accused.

"Not at all," Frank said indignantly.

"I think you'd better leave now," the older man told him.

Frank looked at the man's wife. She was nodding. "Yes," she said. "You should leave now. I'm sure one of these young people can tell you how to buy a ticket from the machines."

With both of them staring at him the way they were, Frank felt almost physically repelled from their space. He got to his feet and took a step back, the world around him resetting itself to Gate 558.

Frank walked back to his spot on the bench, then glanced back at the older couple. He half expected to see them complaining to each other about him, but they had resumed their former immobility.

"I don't understand this at all," Frank muttered to himself.

A sudden cheery burst of laughter drew his attention to the trio of elderly women at the end of the bench he'd been sitting on. Figuring he had nothing to lose, Frank turned his steps toward them. As he drew nearer, he saw that they held cards and markers. As one, they reached down with their markers to the cards.

"My word, Margie, you're getting close," one of the women said.

Frank realized they were playing Bingo. He stopped right where he was, then spun on his heel and headed back to his seat. "Nope," he muttered. "Not doing that."

Now he was facing back the way he'd come, Frank saw someone he hadn't noticed before: A young woman who was slumped down on the bench, her body somehow crammed into the small square of space between the armrests. She was a tiny person, but something in the way she hugged herself indicated a wish to keep out of sight.

Curiosity piqued, Frank approached her cautiously. Settling into the seat next to her, he gently leaned forward, watching to see her response. She was shuddering and gasping: In grief? Surely upset about something...

As if on a dimmer switch, the light in the room faded. In the matter of a moment it was almost too dark to see. Glancing around, Frank saw that they were now in some sort of closet, with only light from the crack under the door spilling into the tiny space. Moving a leg, Frank heard a metallic scrape; a bucket, he thought. This must be a janitorial closet...

The young woman saw him and seemed to shrink even more into herself. "Don't hurt me," she whimpered in a barely audible voice.

"I won't hurt you," Frank said gently. "Can you tell me what the trouble is?"

"Are you kidding? You don't know?" Her fear flashed into anger. "It's a goddamn school shooter!"

As if to punctuate her words there was a sudden distant scream, and then a round of gunfire. A sound of running and shouting came from the corridor outside – Frank assumed it was a corridor, anyway – and then a new volley of gunfire sounded, closer than before. There was a scream from just outside the door, then another voice began shouting – a young man begging for his life, Frank thought.

More gunfire sounded and the voice fell silent.

The young woman slapped her hands over her mouth and seemed to bite down on them, but despite her efforts a keening scream began to well up from her.

The closet door rattled, hard.

"Come out, come out, whoever you are," a singsong voice called from the other side of the door – a voice that sounded cold, deranged, disconnected.

Frank, startled, sprang up and jumped back. Instantly, he was back in the gate area; looking down at the young woman, he saw how she hugged herself tighter still, bringing her arms up around her head in a defensive posture. Then she seemed to freeze in place.

Frank hesitated, unsure what to do. A moment went by; the young woman seemed to relax, her arms dropping. A moment later, she was wrapping her arms around herself once more. Starting from the beginning all over again, like a film loop? Or had she moved on to some new nightmare?

Frank stepped slowly away.

Back at his seat, Frank ran through it all in his mind once again. "A nude beach. A skate park. A bus terminal. A Bingo hall. A closet during a school shooting." He glanced back at the wall.

Gate 558

"And an airport terminal gate," he addended. "Places to sit and wait? Places to rest? What do all these have in common?" He looked at the woman with the screaming kids and wondered what kind of place she could possibly think she was in that would be suited to the racket her children were making. Did she think they were at the movies? In a restaurant? On a train?

A pleasant female voice came on over the loudspeaker. "Paging passenger Frank Biscoy. Passenger Frank Boscoy, please approach the service desk..."

Frank looked up and over to the desk. Two smiling airline employees, both women, stood there, one speaking into a handset. The woman who was speaking gave a sidelong look at Frank even as she paged him.

"Once again, passenger Frank Biscoy please come to the service desk."

She kept her eyes on him and kept smiling as Frank approached the desk.

"Well?" he asked gruffly when he got there.

"Such unfriendly thoughts," the woman chided him.

"I beg your pardon?"

"That poor woman sees herself in a clinic waiting room. Her kids are sick."

Frank looked around at the young mother, then back to the airline employee. "So? Is that important?"

"To her it is."

"Yeah? Seems to me there's more to worry about. Like, what the hell is going on here?"

"You're in a place that's... well, in between other places."

"Oh my God," Frank groaned. "What fresh hell...?"

The women both laughed. "Not at all. Not even purgatory," the woman who had been talking with him said. "This is just a place where you take some time for yourself. Where you wait for your next journey."

"Or where you re-live your worst moments?" Frank glanced in the direction of the terrified young woman, out of sight where she huddled on the bench.

"For some people this is a place of reflection. For others, a place of transition. For others... a place where they end up stuck in trauma or some other strong emotional response."

I'll just bet, Frank thought to himself. "And what am I doing here?" he demanded.

"Well, you're waiting for your next journey, aren't you?" the woman asked him. "You can go anywhere from here. Or nowhere. But you aren't done, are you?"

"Done? With what?"

"Life. The struggle, the challenge, the drama, the noise."

"As opposed to...?"

"Whatever. Wherever. That's up to you, really."

Frank leaned hard on the counter. It felt real. The strain and weight in his arms felt real. He felt real. "Do you mean that this place is some sort of mental construct, or a dream realm?"

The woman simply smiled at him.

"No wonder it's so loopy," Frank sighed. "This isn't the real world at all."

"Actually," the woman offered, "it's much more real than the world you're headed back to. It's that place that's irrational, random, surreal. And yet, many souls seek a return there... some of them time after time. Such as yourself: Time after time you return there."

"Do I?" Frank eyed her skeptically; was she judging him? But her smile seemed gentle and sincere. "And how long do I have to wait here?"

"No longer than you wish. You can depart now, if you'd like. Are you ready to go?"

Frank looked around the gate area once more – looked again at all the faces he'd surveyed so many times before. "I'll say I am. The sooner, the better."

"In that case, you may board."

Frank's eyes moved to the floor-to-ceiling window. The tarmac outside the gate was empty; beyond it the night sky was an obsidian blank. "But there's no plane out there."

"Do you really think you need one?" the woman asked him.

"No..." Frank looked at the door beyond the service desk. On the other side was a bland corridor, just like there always was when boarding a plane. But at the end of the corridor was a wall of light he couldn't see into.

Frank started around the desk to the corridor, but the woman stopped him. "Do you have a ticket?"

Frank fished the incomprehensible boarding pass from his pocket.

"That will do, thanks," the woman said.

Frank started walking again, but at the edge of the door he stopped and turned back. "Where am I going?" he asked.

The two women glanced at each other and burst into laughter.

"You find out when you get there," the woman told him. "Just as always."

Frank considered that. It made more sense than anything else about this place.

"Okay, then," he said, and, turning, made his way into whatever came next.

Next week, we meet a pair of most unusual lovers: Two men living in a place and time where love like theirs is called a disease... but real disease is bought, paid for, and used as a weapon – or a political tool. Join us as our heroes fight a quiet battle, no matter the odds, "In Sickness and In Health."