The Games

Chapter THIRTY-SIX



Ben pushed through the throng of sweating bodies that crowded at the terminal exit, pulling his single carry-on bag like a trailing toddler behind him. The crowd sucked at his black duffel, threatening to pull it from his grasp in the sway of their bodies. He yanked hard, pushed hard, and popped free into the flow of pedestrian traffic along the causeway. He didn’t bother to fight the flow; he trusted the river of people to take him where he needed to be.

Everywhere was shouting. If there had been more room to move, Ben was sure there would have been a stampede. But these people weren’t scared; they were angry. He could see it on their faces.

Along the high arch of the ceiling, every other panel of lights threw only shadows, lending a darkened, surreal aspect to the entire spectacle. Ben was careful to keep his feet moving squarely beneath him. He’d seen what crowds could do with tripped footing if given half a chance.

Up ahead he saw the reason for the turmoil. On the enormous sign showing times and destinations, not a single flight number sat adjacent to the words “on time.” The words “canceled” or “delayed” sat instead on the long flight board. He listened then, and from what he could decipher from the periodic informational blasts being pumped out of the speakers, there was some sort of problem with the power.

“There is no cause for alarm,” the speakers informed him. “Airport emergency backup generators are now running. However, it has been necessary to shut down many of the runways. We apologize for the inconvenience.” Ben knew the runways they were able to keep lit were being used to land planes, not for letting them take off. Some of these people were going to be here for quite a while.

He pushed his way into an eddy that looked promising and finally wriggled free from the cloying river of people entirely. Down an escalator he went. Someone was speaking Chinese behind him. And in front of him, he recognized the rounded syllables of native New Englanders. Ben considered the tops of their heads from his perch exactly three steps behind.

A flood of voices bubbled up the escalator from the other direction, providing bits and pieces of conversation, a variety of facial expressions. Angry faces. Faces pulled taut by anxiety. Frustrated faces by the dozen. Then, inexplicably, a beaming, beautiful face. Up she went past him, bearing her smile with her. What was she smiling about?

But then she was gone, and he had more serious issues to worry about.

Of the faces he saw—even the smiling face—he noticed that not one seemed to be lost in thought. Not one seemed pointed inward toward the happenings in Phoenix earlier tonight. It must have been on the news all over the country, yet Ben could see no evidence here. They were in the moment, living close to the surface of their eyes. The electrical problem loomed first and foremost on their individual horizons; its effect on their evening and their travels blotted out other calamities. An evening’s inconvenience was all it took. The world went on. Maybe the stain of tonight’s Olympic tragedy really could all go away someday. Maybe what he’d seen and been a part of would someday fade into the public’s unconscious. For the distance of the escalator, he enjoyed imagining his career wasn’t over.

Then he was off, and the baggage exchange was snaking by on his left, with its attendant crowd of travelers—the group of them straining their collective necks to see just past the next serpentine convolution of the conveyor belt. He passed by, thankful he was traveling light.

Glass doors with night in their panes stood off in the distance, teasingly close. He ground to a halt at the back of a line. The line snapped shut behind, consuming him. He pushed through.

The glass doors opened for him, and he moved into a night that was a night only in the sense of its diminished stuff to see by. In a way, it was as though he was still indoors.

Above him, gray concrete spread out in two directions. It was a road eight lanes across, topped over, he knew, with another road eight lanes across. It was an artery leading from and to the airport, but it was a special kind of artery, with bright yellow platelets. They eased along, slowing in the narrow capillaries, carrying a cargo of passengers instead of oxygen. And what did that make him, exactly? A malarial parasite, perhaps, hoping to hook its way into a blood cell.

He moved behind the shouting crowd, their arms raised and waving at the approaching taxis. The cabs came and went, and the crowd seemed not to notice for all the size it changed.

Using an old trick he’d learned in his time in New York, Ben moved to the left and walked briskly against the flow of road traffic. The crowd near the street thinned as he distanced himself from the airport doors, and then the wall pushed the sidewalk smaller and smaller until it was nothing at all, forcing him to walk on the white line. He stepped into the road.

A cab loomed, but Ben didn’t move. It stopped a few feet short of his knees, and he jumped around and opened the door, throwing himself and his bag inside before it could pull away.

“San Bernardino,” Ben said.

“Which side?”

“Technical district. Double the rate if you get me there in half an hour.”

The cabbie’s eyes found him in the rearview. “That’ll be tough.”

“You can do it.”

“I want triple if I get a speeding ticket, half hour or no.”

“Fair.”

The cab pulled forward past the shouting, outraged wall of faces.