We are quiet. There are nearly sixty of us in line, by my estimate. We stand where the markings tell us to stand and we do not interact with one another. A cargo van idles on the road beside us. Taxi doors close in the distance as more foreigners arrive.
The young man in front of me turns around. His beard is long like mine is and wildly grasps at the fringes of his mask. He muffles forth a suffocated, “Do you have a pen I can borrow?”
I pretend like sharing the pen is not the great sin that it is. I hand it over to him and smile though all expressions are now reduced to eyes over the tops of mask fabric. He uses the pen to write his name and address on the cards they gave us. When he hands it back I don’t know if he senses my hesitation. I touch what he has touched and now we have risked infecting each other—the violation is the closest thing I have felt to intimacy in weeks.
An airport worker corrals us forward. “Two meters apart, please. Two meters. That’s it. Stand on the lines.”
Representatives from the embassy wear neon yellow vests with paper American flags pinned on the back. They walk up and down the line, awaiting their chance to respond to questions we do not ask.
When it is my turn, I leave my bags to the side and I go up to the mandatory hand washing station. Assistants in full coveralls and masks and goggles watch me as I lather my hands. I dry them and throw the paper towel into a bin with a biohazard sign above it. I return to my bags and then proceed forward.
Next is the man at the lectern. He stands behind plexiglass as if ready to give a lonely sermon: Book of Revelation, perhaps.
“Your passport,” he says. “Pull down your mask, please.”
He reviews my face, the passport, and my face again.
“Ok, go ahead,” he says, crossing my name off of a list.
I cross the threshold and enter the open atrium of glass and steel. An infrared camera is pointed at me like a gun and held there for a three count.
“Hold on,” they say as they review the image. “Okay. You’re okay.”
I sigh.
Inside I get in another line zigzagging up to the ticket counters. There are voices now coming from the lines, mostly American; conversations and questions that echo in the emptiness of the great hall. I drop my heavy backpack onto the ground and wonder which of the many surfaces I contact will be the one with the virus. This thought accompanies me up to the counter, as I receive my ticket, as I go through security and proceed to the only gate open in the entire airport.
Beside a moving walkway another man in coveralls and goggles and gloves walks by a poster of a crystal clear beach extending from a rocky coast. Text on the poster reads: El mundo le pertenece a quienes lo recorren: The world belongs to those who travel it.
We are leaving to hopefully return to places we once felt belonged to us, grasping at the idea that we can still connect to them despite being isolated for so long. My fear is that now those places are as warped as Bogotá is. Or maybe my real fear is that even without a pandemic, I had never had a place like that to begin with.
As we wait for the flight I can see that we have all prepared for this journey differently. Three members of one family are covered from head to toe in protective equipment. The parents sit the required two meters apart from one another and distract themselves with their phones. The light of their screens reflects off of the transparent plastic shields attached to their heads like welders’ masks. Their son cannot stay put and goes back and forth between them, reaching out to place his arm around their shoulders.
Others, including myself, only wear masks that cover the nose and mouth. An older woman with both a Coach handbag and carry-on has a mask with a faux-gold emblem of some other reputable brand on it. She takes out her hand sanitizer every fifteen minutes, rinses her hands, and wipes down the surfaces of her luggage. Then she takes out a small makeup mirror and ensures that her mask sits evenly on her face and that her hair is in order. When I look over at her she turns away as if gazes also carry risk of contagion.
There in the waiting area for the gate we rest assured that our precautions have been sufficient. There is ample room and we can keep away from one another. But soon we march into spaces steadily more compromised: first the line past the flight attendants checking tickets, then the boxed-in gangway, then into the airplane cabin. By the time we are at our seats we wonder if the original precautions were all for nought.
The flight attendants make announcements over the intercom exhorting the last passengers in the aisle to keep a safe distance from one another. When we are all seated she explains how the plane has been disinfected and how the air is clean and that we do not have to worry. Her tone is like that of a gunman telling hostages that everything is going to be okay.
This is a so-called humanitarian flight provided by the US embassy. It is hard to glean the origins of the semantics. They charged me four-hundred and sixty dollars for the ticket and that’s only for the stretch to Florida.
They remind us over the intercom that there will be no complimentary food or drink. “Not even water,” the flight attendant clarifies. “You must purchase any food or drink that you want.” Welcome aboard Spirit airlines. Welcome back to America.
Before we pierce through the low grey clouds threatening afternoon rain, we fly right over my neighborhood and I can make out my apartment building and the four blocks that my life had been reduced to over the last sixty-four days. And then we get enveloped by the clouds and I cannot see anything, neither what lies below nor ahead. The plane trembles and shakes in the grey clouds and we hold our breaths and clutch our armrests. But then we break through and the skies are clear above us and the sun enters in where the small windows allow it to. It must have been that way the whole time, I remind myself. When I had looked at the grey from my apartment window I had forgotten that there were clear skies above. As the fuselage tilts northward, a beam of sun slowly lifts to my face and I bask in the warmth.
* * *
The arrival into Fort Lauderdale is marked by everything that is absent. There is no hand washing station, no infrared camera, no temperature check. There is no health assessment, no mention of quarantine, no question of where we are headed next nor what precautions we need to take upon arrival. Only about a third of the people I see are wearing masks. It is easy for me to believe that I have returned to some semblance of normality, easier still to let the guard down that I had firmly in place only hours before.
My flight to Denver is not until the next morning. I must head into the humid bowels of Fort Lauderdale where I have booked a cheap hotel for the night. The reception desk is encased in thick plexiglass, a barrier erected long before the virus. The receptionist slips me a key card under the glass and I haul my bags to room one sixteen. A police car sits in the parking lot with two officers watching me as I go in. A boisterous couple argues with each other in the foyer. Down the hall there are broken women in short skirts and spaghetti-strap tops that eye me as I go in.
A nagging weight has haunted this journey since the beginning. Every surface I graze, every suffocating space I squeeze into, and every interaction I have with another carries the risk of propagation—so I have been told and so I believe. If it is not true, then what have we been hiding from all this time?
I have moved about for the last day with a perverse mindfulness that, should I make a mistake, the results will be grave. Reclining into the cushioned backseat of a taxi could bring future fever and chills. The holding of the hotel keycard may usher me to my mother’s bedside as she gasps for air. The accidental bump into an airport employee might be what triggers impossibly long nights in an ICU. Am I already infected? Have I been sewing a thread of infection that ties these disparate people and points of the world together: the man who checked my passport in Bogota, the woman who took my credit card at the Fort Lauderdale airport Chic-fil-A, the flight attendant that said goodbye to me as I left my flight in Charlotte, the guests staying in my mom’s house in Denver?
But what else is there to do? Do we hide away and collapse into ourselves awaiting the end of all this? Or do take advantage of the uncertain time left, time that doesn’t seem to stretch on toward the infinite like we previously thought? The old thought-experiment that we puzzled ourselves with before is less make-believe: What if this was your last week on Earth? What would you do?
I would embrace, and caress, and pat on the back; I would bring you close and stare into your eyes and imbibe our conversation as a delicacy; I would run my fingers through your hair; I would stroke your hand and listen and smile and listen more; I would both hold tight and let go—what were we worried about anyway? I would be honest; I wouldn’t hide away anymore; I would go out into the world and sit in the sunshine with you and dream of that future that couldn’t be—but damn, if it could have been, it would have been bliss.
* * *
The freshness of the air is what is most familiar. The summer birds are now out in the ponderosas and their songs are like tunes of my teenage years. I used to come to this ridgeline then all the time and climb the boulders and sit and listen and watch the cars silently float along the highway far below. Now time seems to be playing tricks on me. Bogotá only simmers somewhere near the subconscious. The stretch of a decade from the last time I was among those boulders seems just a day. The uncertainty of yesterday dissipates in the breeze. Maybe we do have all that time ahead of us still.
For all its familiarity, it is bigger than I remember. It’s a place a soul can stretch out a bit and blend into the air and sunshine. There is nothing but cerulean sky overhead. Not a trace of grey to be seen.
