While checking the angle of her pillbox hat, she noticed a faux pas of graver consequence in the reflection she cast in the polished black marble and alabaster. A pair of her precious metal wings appeared somewhat askew. A twist of her silk-covered white fingers and there: the gold pin beamed brilliantly perpendicular to the rounded edge of her uniform jacket.
Smiling now, she raised her eyes and cast an authoritative yet pleasant look toward the souls snaked before her through the maze of strung crimson velvet.
"May I help the next in line?" she called.
He approached stiff legged, stopping only when he could rest his cold, callused palms on the counter.
"Hello, sir, and welcome to TGA! How may I help you?"
He was just a shade, maybe two, under six feet tall with a pronounced rounding of the shoulders that, because of a weak neck and a bellyful of overindulgence, gave him the quality of a broken bowling pin. He leaned in with a stare that focused precisely on nothing in particular which was well enough as there was little ahead for him to see.
"Where," he stammered. "Where the hell am I?"
"Not hell, sir. The TGA ticketing counter," she said. "I'm Sera, and I'm here to assist you on your journey. Your ticket, please. … It's right there."
His eyes followed Sera's pristinely gloved index finger to the outer breast pocket of his best black suit jacket that others would notice as freshly pressed but to him it's only quality was of a vague chemical warmth. The pocket held a crisp sheet of linen paper, folded in slightly uneven thirds.
He handed the paper to Sera, who shook it open with a single snap of her wrist.
When her eyes arrived at the bottom, she laid it down with a fluid outward turn of her left hand that end in a halting flourish, very much like a conductor calling for the harpist to cease by any means necessary, such as thrusting her body onto the strings or smothering them between the adjacent kettledrums.
"Very well, Mr. Mann," Sera said. She picked up an ink stamp and punched his ticket like a defense lawyer hits the elevator button when knows the jury is hung. Her fingers then began performing their own private concerto on the computer keyboard just to the right of her station.
Clickity-clickity-thump-clickity-thump-thump.
The rhythmic percussion roused him from catalepsy. He wrenched his semi-hinged head as best he could and saw thousands of people coiled behind him, each with the odd piece of luggage in tow and the same defeated hollowness in the eyes.
O'Hare, he thought.
Mmm, no.
Midway. Definitely Midway.
He could feel his chest rise and fall with each breath. The familiarity made his shoulders, such as they were, relax and release the tenuous hold they had on the leather strap slung over them. The bag it held fell to the floor but he hardly noticed as rather than the cringe-inducing thud one might have expected, it hit with the dullness of a half-cooked pancake.
"I must have been in that line so long I dozed off standing up," he said, shaking his wobbly head. "You should really consider installing some of those boarding pass kiosks so people can serve themselves."
"Self service is why you are in the line to begin with, Mr. Mann," she said with a chipperness that pinpricked his brain. "I have Seat 28Q reserved for you. It's a middle seat, Mr. Mann, but then that's all we every have on TGA."
"I … huh?"
"What's that, Mr. Mann?"
"Um, back up a bit. What … what did you mean about self service is why I'm here?"
Typing once again without a glance at her fingers, Sera's words rang with a harsh brightness of tone. "Self-absorption, self-aggrandizement, self-medicating, self-involved. The usual, Mr. Mann. Just the usual."
His jaw dropped a bit.
"Ooooh. And self-abuse," she continued after a quick glance down at the monitor. "Abnormal amount of that on your record, too. The modern and, well, Old Testament type. Hard to believe you found time to fit in all those other missteps giving the time you spent in your office men's room."
Mann shook his head, such as it was again, in hopes of resetting his hearing, but it everything instead grew clearer. "Self-abuse? Did you say self-abuse?"
"Yes, I did, Mr. Mann. Now, how much baggage do you have to check?"
He was about wag a finger in protest, but in his periphery he caught sight of a pile of trunks, large and small, brown and black and camouflage, mostly battered and stained. To get them all here, it must has taken an entire fleet of the Hummers Mr. Mann obsessed over back at his dealership off the smog-choked interstate.
"Is that … all mine?"
"Mmmm, I'd say so, Mr. Mann. I can see your name tags on them from here."
He stared at them. He blinked. He blinked harder and longer. He saw the tags, too.
"A. Mann," they read in simple print right below what appeared to be a corporate logo. He focused deeper to make out a dim gray oval with fog-like wisps of black and white spelling "TGA" and a smaller line of text below. He squinted until his face ached from the effort and the words unfortunately grasped.
In one heaving sigh, Mr Mann expelled plainly: "TGA. Trans Gression Airlines. …
"Hoooly shit."
A carillon of laughter peeled throughout the terminal silence.
"Oh, Mr. Mann," Sera sputtered, trying to regain her business-like demeanor. "Excuse me. Oh. But that one joke never gets old!"
Clickity-clickity-thump-clickity-thump-thump.
THUMP.
"And here's your boarding pass, Mr. Mann," said Sera, handling him a final slip. "Thank you and have an intolerably long flight."
