Lost Time in the Turnaround by Sarah Ramdawar
2200 words, 11 minutes reading time
Issue 2 (Spring/Summer 2023)
Amar’s wife is passing through YYZ tonight. She may have forgotten him this time, but he will see her anyway; he always sees her here (—this is where my family lives after all). Space and time didn’t manifest itself in his schedule to see his family during his last shift, so he’s hoping it will this shift.
Amar is lucky that he happens to work in the Toronto Pearson International Airport, the largest airport in Canada. It is a through place for some; a rest stop for others looking to move and expand ever onwards, outwards, and upwards; or a final home for many—the end of a long journey towards this country and settling on the first safe spot for weary feet. Amar first came to Canada through this very airport, and he met his wife here, and he’s continuing to meet her here still. This place of goings and comings, constant movement and bustle, is built to forget. Amar does not forget.
•••••••••••••
Amar is one of the people responsible for cleaning, stripping, and waxing the floors of the terminals. This shift, he’s been assigned to ride his floor scrubber in Terminal 1, the newest of the three terminals. To keep these floors clean, to wash away the dirt and grime of hundreds of countries from thousands of feet is an ever-present constant in staving away annihilation. That’s what upper management said at the end of orientation, anyway. Through time, Amar found this to be true, although he often wondered whose annihilation?
Large LED dotted letters mark his path along airline desks: (A B C D E F G), all consecutively forward along the alphabet. It’s good he can still see those letters, because he can’t make out the smaller LED’s on the eye-height Arrivals and Departures board, even when his face is close enough to see the individual coloured red, green, and blue specks that make up the glaring bright white light. The hours and minutes on all the screens never looked like anything except for long, bright, melting blobs to him. So much for being nearsighted instead of farsighted, he thought.
He doesn’t look at the planes flying overhead anymore. The best he does is glance at the wheels of jetliners taking off or touching down whenever he’s near the windows. There’s no point in witnessing other people’s beginnings and endings and in-betweens while he waits for his wife to return from her time dilating work, and he is perpetually pinned in place on this omniscient Google Map.
•••••••••••••
Sometimes Amar feels like he spends more time scrubbing by hand than using the machine. This time, what he finds when he’s on his arthritic knees scraping, scraping with a putty knife is an oval piece of paper, covered in a trailing dried amber goo (it smells like honey) and twitching black specks. Between the time of this honey being liquid to being putty, ants swarmed the concentrated nectar and got themselves stuck. Some were still alive, twitching an appendage or antennae with hopes of freeing themselves. Amar scrapes up the ants along with the honey and manages to get the paper sheet off in one piece. He holds it up for closer inspection, notices three holes in the paper–two on the top, one wider one on the bottom. It’s a paper beauty mask. Was someone doing a last minute facial before they met their love?
“Hi stranger.”
Amar looked through his brow and smiled. He was always looking up to meet her. Kiran was long and lean, and he was short and stocky. She had on her airline issued silk scarf tied to the side of her neck, her floral tweed suitcase beside her.
“Let’s get you up,” she said as she held his upper arm; she leaned back, using her high heels as a fulcrum to bear the weight of pulling his body up. He creaked closer towards her (she smells like honey). “You look so old, old man,” she said as she playfully ran her hands through his grey hair. She looked so young.
She’s a flight attendant subject to the Twin Paradox and as such, she loses time in the turnaround. She handed him a pamphlet once on an airport lounge coffee date. Whenever she travelled away from him, through space while he was stuck there, he’d get a little older or she’d get a little younger–he wasn’t quite sure. She told him once that it was at the point she turned around, changed direction, and made the way back home that she lost the time—it was just physics. It wasn’t a paradox; they’d figured out the logistics of how to take advantage of Special Relativity a while ago (the axis of me where the hour and minute hands anchor is you).
The difference wasn’t as noticeable to regular passengers as much as it was for the crew. Even if they met the reduced threshold for frequent fliers, passengers might only notice an extra grey hair or two once they return home. However, the flight crew was subject to altered laws to keep the industry profitable. And even among them, dilation could be different depending on if they had anyone waiting for them at home. Most flight crew lived from place-to-place along with their friends and family. It was what they found attractive about the job. You couldn’t compare yourself to anyone if everyone you knew had the entire world as their commute.
Kiran’s cheeks were full and bright and coral. Her smile looked like it was in accordance with the flight attendant mandate, although there was always a twinge in the corner of her lip like she wanted to say something about a persnickety passenger, but thought better than to dwell in the past.
“How are the kids?” Amar asked.
“Oh you know, the girls have their own thing now, they hardly call anymore. You should be asking about your son. He’s interested in horse racing now! What he finds in those animals going round and round on that endless track, I don’t know. He thinks he’ll enter a race, and I just…you need to speak with your son…”
Amar loved hearing her speak. She could go on and on about nothing and everything, the constant pitter-patter of her words grounded his spirit (tick tock. staccato movement).
“Walk me to my next gate,” she said as she gathered her things to leave, again.
“Gladly.” Amar took his wife’s arm and headed towards security and saw her off again through the guards, where he couldn’t follow this time.
•••••••••••••
Amar waits in Terminal 3 for his family to arrive, on break after scrubbing down a bathroom from a traveller’s mess. With his coveralls wet with toilet water, he sits out of the way along a concrete wall. He had placed a clean hot rag on his face, eyes closed from the murmurations of people moving around him.
“A B C D E F G, next time won’t you sing–” Amar recognised the familiar child’s voice getting closer to him,
“–with meeeee!” the child screamed, and Amar felt a weight on his legs. He pulled the cloth from his face,
“No, no, no, kiddo! You can’t hug dad right now.” He pulled her off his leg with a well toned arm. She sulked and hid behind her mother.
Kiran reached out a hand and stroked Amar’s stubbly face. She asked, “Bathroom?”
“Bathroom,” he said.
Kiran laughed and said, when he got cleaned up, he could meet her later when the kids were in bed.
“When my shift’s over,” he replied.
“Put that cloth back on your face. I want to give you a kiss. Look, I’ll do the same,” Kiran giggled with knowing silliness.
She untied her silk scarf from around her neck and held it over her face. Amar followed her lead. He covered his head with his rag and although he couldn’t see her, he felt the imprint of her lips on his through the layers of cloth and her warm breath steaming his face. Catching this rare connection in the middle of work was a brief delight. Then, her lips were gone. Amar moved the rag and looked around.
She walked away with their child in one hand, floral tweed suitcase in the other.
•••••••••••••
Amar is in Terminal 2.
Is there a Terminal 2 anymore? Is it lost? In space? In time?
He just got a job in Toronto Pearson International Airport. He’d been in the country a few years now, but this was his first full-time position. He was tasked with collecting the garbage in huge rolling bins. It was early morning and there was no one here. Amar wondered if someone was playing a trick on him. Would a group show up and throw him into one of the bins like a hazing? Would they wheel him off and leave him?
“Hello? Hello!”
There was nobody.
Amar turned around to leave the way he came, but he heard something. A distant
Click-clack,
a tick-tock,
(tick tock. staccato movement)
from the other end of the terminal. He looked up to see a figure–she had long sun-bleached hair and a multicoloured suitcase. The early morning sun shone high through the windows, silhouetting her against the bright light, breaking up the beams that travelled so far from the sun to get here.
Click-clack
Tick-tock
(tick tock. staccato movement)
Her heels made a constant thrum towards him, never breaking the beat, or his heart. It carried him, planted him to this unwaxed floor. Maybe she shouldn’t be walking this way, towards him. He can’t be there for her, or the children, he’s stuck in this place. This space between them right now could be static, could be frozen, and they needn’t ever live in this intersection of all things.
She reached him.
There was every feeling confounding him waiting to be discharged.
Static.
There was a charge—built up over the longest journey, through the precipitations of space, meant to be dissipated in this place.
He felt every beat in his heart, counted them. (this is where I carry time. with you. here.)
“Hi stranger,” Kiran said.
“Hi.” Amar said, clumsily trying to move his floppy hair from his eyes to look up at her. When he realized there was no point, he plunged his hands deep into the pockets of his coveralls.
“There’s no one here,” she said. “Except us.”
“Except us,” he said.
“It’s my first day.”
“It’s my first day too.”
“My name’s Kiran.”
“Mine’s Amar.”
They walked and talked together shoulder-to-shoulder through the length of the terminal. Over and over again. When they reached one end, they turned around and walked to the next. There was no one there to tell them otherwise.
Kiran was born in Canada, a second-generation immigrant, Amar found out. And Amar was born in India, a first-generation immigrant, Kiran found out. Taking advantage of the empty concourse, Amar gave Kiran a ride on a luggage trolley, rolling it down like a plane on an empty runway, their simultaneity lines converging here making skid marks on the ground he would one day need to scrub.
People started showing up at the airport, of course. But time was still, here, now. They appeared one by one, and they were silent and motionless. Unlike regular, breathing, moving people walking on the ground, they were hanging in the air, floating or suspended. First it was just a few, and then hundreds of people popped up, staggered into existence like they had always been there but not, as they looked blankly into the distance.
Whether it was their youth, or the quietude of this place and time, or wanting to live fully in the strangest and loneliest of situations, they came to know each other for the first time on the airport floor, with people standing above them, and all around them, still.
(It smells like honey.)
•••••••••••••
Kiran needed to catch her inaugural flight, but she didn’t know which way to go. Amar located the information booth, but the attendant who should have been behind the counter was found instead floating fixed above it. Their uniform mandated bowler hat was fastened so far down their head that their face was obscured in a drooping, perpetual shadow. They could not be persuaded or moved to help.
Amar and Kiran took endless escalators up and down, straight across, and sometimes diagonally. Some were slow and some were fast. The signs didn’t help, because they made no sense–they weren’t in a language that either of them understood. Through an intuition that didn’t belong to her yet, Kiran reached what she knew was her gate. Off travelling near the speed of light, she said her goodbyes and promised to see him on the way back.
Amar carried her in his heart (beating in time. with you. here.). He wondered if he would live forever stuck in this liminal space where family only ever existed in between perpetual work.
(—this is where my family lives after all)
With the turn of her heel, she is away from him again. The world ticks. The people in the sky all fall down, and Amar continues to collect other people’s trash.
He doesn’t know time by clock or sunset or sunrise, but he knows the time. The scent of honey lingers in the air, he hears a giggle in the distance.