City of Destruction

The Arrival

   I woke up after a seven and a half hour flight just before we landed.  The movement of the other passengers standing up to remove their baggage from the overhead compartments had awakened me, although there weren’t very many of us onboard.  Silently, we followed each other one by one past the gloomy flight attendants as they mumbled their farewells. Thankfully, I had not brought very many bags with me because I was not planning to stay here in this foreign country for long.  That meant I could bypass baggage claim and head straight for the exit, where I could find a taxicab and make my way to my father’s address. Walking through the nearly empty airport corridors, the drowsiness still clouding the corners of my mind would hardly allow me to register the muffled anger reverberating through the air.  Only vaguely could I detect the itch of the foreigners watching me from the corners of their eyes, from beneath the shadows of their brows, from the dark heat of their squinting stares.
     Driving through the city in the back of the cab, I found it uninteresting how empty the streets looked.  Perhaps this particular place was merely densely populated. Knowing how very close to the verge of being an antisocialist my father was, I figured maybe this was one of the qualities that convinced him to move here, outside of the exceptional and highly affordable healthcare the country provided.  My aging father had lost one of his legs in the U.S. Marines while fighting in the Afghan War, so I understood his need to prioritize the best for his health.

    My father’s residence turned out to be a large building made of pale tan brick.  It was six stories high and was very plain to look at from the front. One glass door served as the entrance, and two small windows flanked the door.  There were no other windows on the front of the building. The building was large on the inside, however, with a lot of open space and white walls that appeared to be freshly painted.  Dark red carpeting covered the steps of the dark wooden staircases that lined the walls. Black-and-white tile made up the floor of the lobby, which was decorated with a large mirror, a vase of yellow azaleas on a cherrywood table and two high-backed cherrywood chairs.

    Father’s apartment was small – just one studio space with a kitchen in the back and a tiny bathroom off to the side as soon as I stepped in through the front door.  He had a twin-sized bed off to the left and a small round brown table beneath a sliding window to the right. Only the window served to let the summer air into the hot, stuffy room.  My brother and his girlfriend had arrived before I did, and the three had obviously already cracked open a bottle of vodka in celebration of being together again.