A Shrine to an Unknown God

STRANGER

THE AIRPORT IS A STRANGE, SPRAWLING WHITE labyrinth of a building, unknowable in its entirety. The driver drops us off at the central entrance. We thank her graciously for her services and promise her our first-born.

Inside, there is blue everywhere and odd glass tiles on the floor. We enter into a large waiting area where everything is moving—people briefly taking a seat before popping up again to greet a returning loved one or rush off deeper into the building. An amalgam of languages dance across my ears, all of them strange to me. Voices come from nowhere. Lights come from the ceiling. Short, jarring beeps sound off every couple of seconds.

We head to a tall gray screened machine that Marisol begins tapping on, her long nails making this strangely satisfying pap-pap-pap against the screen.

Ezra leans up against it, his eyes still crusted over with sleep. "I really don't wanna go back home."

"Why not?" Dahlia asks.

There is too much going on in the world around us for me to pay much attention to their conversation.

In the air there is something I can't quite describe, those nuances I fear—only here there isn't any fear in them, only comfort. Here everybody is unknown and everybody is an outsider. Here are people who have lived in this city their whole lives and still have to check the map to get from one point in its airport to another. Here are people coming to vacation, to visit their families. Here are people charting off to countries I've never heard of before, making a quick pit-stop on the way. I can tell that some of them are foreigners just by the way they dress and talk and sometimes even move. I wonder if they feel the same about me.

All of us, mixed together like this, none knowing where another is from or where their final destination is, if they even have one.

I watch the faces of passersby and try to find something in them, anything. But there is nothing familiar to me about this place.

"Because it sucks," Ezra replies. "Life there sucks. Everything there sucks. I could stay in Greece forever."

"Then why don't you?" Dahlia counters. "You're, like, twenty-something, right? You can make your own decisions. It's your life, not anybody else's."

"You should be a motivational speaker. You could have your own TedTalk. Meet Ted himself and face him in a boss battle."

"What would I gain by defeating him?"

"Infinite power."

"But at what cost?"

"Who is Ted?" I ask. "Is he a god?"

Marisol then hands us each a small white ticket. "Don't lose it," she orders.

There is no more discussion of this mysterious god Ted.

Ezra and I follow Marisol and Dahlia as they lead us to our next Herculean test: TSA. The main thing that TSA tests is my patience. We wait in a line for what feels like hours, all the while creeping forward at a snail's pace, though we never seem to get any closer to the front than we were when we joined the line.

Finally, we reach the front. We all show the All-Seeing Judge our tickets and passports and Marisol instructs me to remove my shoes. Following her lead, I set my bag down on a strange moving table, then grab a small plastic container in which I place my shoes. After I've successfully completed this, another All-Seeing Judge ushers me inside a machine, a sleek, tall thing that looks like a doorway without a door. When I step out on the other side I collect my belongings, shouldering my bag and shoving my shoes back onto my feet.

Reunited on the other side of TSA, the four of us strategize our next move.

"The gate," Marisol says, looking at her ticket. "It's this way."