Everyone stands to disembark. The man in front of me keeps his red neck pillow around him like a clown collar or one of those things you put around dogs to keep them from licking stitches. My first evening spent alone in an airport terminal begins in T-minus fifteen minutes.
The airport is empty, save for a suspicious-looking VIP lounge filled with relaxed, dark-haired men leaning back in leather club chairs, hands twitching for cigars. Scarface meets Wall Street meets Mexico City International. Rain falls outside, wetting the tarmac and streaking the glass windowpanes.
In a blurry, exhausted fog, I make my way through customs while trying to assess where to go if I am connecting. Incorrectly, I assumed I would be able to stay within the airport, not sleeping outside of my gate for the next six hours. But as indicated by the customs official who points me elsewhere, my only option is to exit the terminal entirely, placing me in a lengthy ticketing hall, equally as empty, though exponentially more exposed; no barrier separates me from Mexico except the glass lobby doors and a half-enclosed roof.
I walk through the lofty marble corridor, passing unmanned ticketing counters that look more like frozen yogurt stands with their eagerly youthful typeface and sherbet-colored palate.
RED!
PINK!
YELLOW!
MORE RED!
I feel like Dorothy upon arrival to Technicolor Lollipop Land.
After a good five-minute walk, I arrive at the ticketing counter for Interjet, what I’ll be flying on the next leg of my journey. It too, of course, is closed. I approach a female security guard, my tired head filled with a mixed bag of pleases and thank yous in other languages, holdovers from traveling to Europe.
“¿Hablas ingles?” I ask.
“Mas o menos.”
“¿Que hora es…[I motion with my arms, unfolding them like the check-in counter is a book and I am peeling the pages apart]…open?”
“El quatro y media.”
“Four thirty?” All of my years of studying Spanish have paid off.
“Si.”
“So I wait until then?”
“Si.”
In the language of universal frustration, I groan. I will now be spending the night in the lobby, which, as I mentioned, is entirely exposed to the current decapitation world record holder. Yay.
I tuck myself in a hallway behind a glass-walled exhibition space, home to Mexican abstractionist paintings during the day and a small fraction of Mexico’s homeless population at night. Men sleep on narrow ledges of dirty faux-birch, caps pulled over their sleeping faces, arms folded over their chests. A small man emerges from a tiny room, barefoot, eyeing me suspiciously, as though I’ve walked into the wrong hotel room.
12:30 a.m. Only six more hours to go.
I catch a second wind and decide to have a midnight breakfast of live-grain tortillas and a can of Starbuck’s Double Shot. I listen to the sound of car tires on the wet street beyond while I crack open my iPad and pray that F. Scott Fitzgerald will be entertaining enough to stave off sleep.
The cops roll around casually, usually in pairs, with a lazed carelessness reminiscent of my brother and his high school buddies while they roamed around school debating if they should stick around for class after nutrition or just hop the fence and smoke pot at my mom’s house. The fact that said cops have taken a visible interest in me only serves to make me more nervous. Using my filthy rolling bag as the neck pillow from hell, I lean back in delicate repose, dragging my pointer finger across the surface of my iPad like some great wizard, turning pages magically. Stay awake. Stay awake. Stay awake.
I sense something, though I barely hear anything at all. I turn to my right. He had quietly advanced upon me. I look over with a start. A foot away from me, an ancient face as worn and wrinkled as one of those potato carvings, lips sucking inwards towards a toothless mouth, has framed itself next to my own. My heart stops. He holds up a piece of paper, mumbling.
“Thank you,” I say. “Gracias.”
I take my fallen piece of paper out of his hands. He continues down the hallway – apparently part of the cleaning crew’s graveyard shift – wiping the whole terminal down with a dishrag affixed to the end of a stick.
Stay awake. Stay awake. Stay awake.
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I spent the night in Mex City airport on the way back. 8 hour sessions at Wings (mexican Norm’s) = 5 victorias, 1 egg mystery plate with beans, 3 glasses of water (poured from a vase), 7 cups of joe, random fruit plate and one cheesy fiction novel. Then I still had 6 hours to go.
All worth it.
I spent a couple weeks in Mexico City, Cancun, Monteray. My favorite memory was of a young woman breast feeding her baby on the subway steps. Third world countries really are different. Enjoy your trip, Jen.