Charlie’s only been in the States properly—off the plane, down the accordion walkway, and out into the bustling airport terminal— for twenty minutes, but he’s already formed a solid opinion about the place: he hates it. 

He supposes he doesn’t hate the entire country, just Atlanta, GA. 

He doesn’t even hate the whole of Atlanta, just specifically and vehemently the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. If there is a hell, Charlie imagines it will look and feel exactly, down to the detail, like Terminal E of this godforsaken building. 

They made the last hour or so of the flight through rough skies; nasty turbulence, rain lashing the windows, and Charlie white-knuckling both armrests. He still feels shaky now, even on solid ground. He was cold on the plane despite his chunky cardigan, but here in the crowded terminal, surrounded by thousands of other bodies, he’s boiling. 

He’d tried to pause outside the gate long enough to ditch the sweater and get his bearings—he has to travel all the way from E28 to A12—but someone collided with his shoulder as soon as he stopped, knocking him into the moving mass of pedestrians before he could find ‘You Are Here’ on the tall terminal map. Now he’s being swept along by the humming crowd at such a steady clip that he’s sure he’ll be trampled if he slows down long enough to remove a layer of clothing. What else can he do? He flows along with the current, clinging to the handle of his rolling suitcase for dear life as sweat puddles in his armpits. At least he’s going in the right direction.

Charlie cranes his neck as the gates slip past sequentially, taking it all in. Well, not all of it. He’d need a few lifetimes to get every detail. This airport is endless. Vast.

He has his default travel playlist blaring through his earbuds (the soundtrack from Lord of the Rings Return of the King) and it’s been on loop for hours. It's a security blanket. His nervous system, as he’s learned, would rather shut down entirely than endure the sort of chaos that comes with international travel. The music keeps Charlie’s pulse under control and stops his hands from curling into panic-attack-crab-claws, even though he’s still uncomfortably clammy. 

Over the music he can hear little snippets—glimpses—of thousands of overlapping conversations. Someone’s aunt passed away before he could make it back home to see her for the last time. Someone else is begging her child to stop licking the metal shield covering the water fountain spout. On his left, an invective is being hurled at an empty automatic hand sanitizer dispenser. On his right, a stout man is coughing, wetly, into his bent elbow.

Out each window Charlie passes it’s still raining, the sky an ugly dark orange, with a heavy squall line hanging over the earth. His head aches, his temples throbbing.

If he actually makes it to Maine alive—which is where he’s meant to end up; this ill-fated detour is a curse known as a “connecting flight”—Charlie vows to go full William Tecumseh Sherman on the return flight.

After what feels like an hour, he’s still nowhere near Terminal A. Time seems to work differently here. It would be an interesting setting for a horror movie except that, as far as Charlie’s concerned, he’s already in one. He makes it as far as E1, swept along with the crowd, before realizing he’s at a dead end. Apparently he was meant to take a turn back at E20 in order to get to Terminals D-T (Why T?) though only the architect of this funhouse nightmare of a building can explain that logic. 

With a sigh, he turns and starts back the way he came. Somehow he’s not swimming against the tide, even though it was decidedly at his back the whole way down to this deserted cul-de-sac of gates. Traffic here flows in both directions simultaneously, and also in a third direction—or maybe another dimension—which is just “fast.” Charlie’s practically sprinting to keep people from bumping into him, but at the same time he has to dodge travelers stood stock-still in the middle of the wide pathway, carrying on casual conversations like they can’t fathom why everyone around them is in such a hurry.  

Charlie finds the turn without any trouble this time. He’s past a flock of pilots, down an escalator, and standing in front of something called a “Plane Train” before he realizes how much his feet hurt. God his feet hurt. 

Maybe there will be seats on this tram thing. He’s not foolish enough to get his hopes up about anything in what might actually, literally, be purgatory, but he lets himself wonder. 

Then the doors open to a definitive 'no.' A pair of teenagers are aggressively making out on the ledge seat at the back. There are at least four hands wrapped around every support pole, several wheelchairs in the spaces between them, and yet another large man leaning against the opposite wall with a nasty-sounding cough. This guy’s not bothering to cover his mouth at all. 

Charlie watches as the scene unfolds in front of him, adjusts the moldable metal strip of his mask over his nose, then steps through the sliding doors. 

He’s been on plenty of trains, but none with so few seats. Nevermind though, anything's better than a walk. He grips his suitcase with one hand and a pole with the other as the car lurches forward. 

At D Gates a platinum-blonde woman steps through the doors, carrying on a conversation through her bluetooth earbud at full volume, and promptly rolls her suitcase across Charlie’s toes. He winces and moves back. At C Gates, they’re joined by a gaggle of hyper schoolchildren with mouse-ear headbands, and a pale, gaunt man who smells so strongly of weed that Charlie’s sure he’s getting a contact high just from being in the same enclosed space with him. On the approach to B Gates, the man behind Charlie coughs directly onto his neck, wet and slimy-warm, and it’s all Charlie can do not to claw at the doors until they open. 

He bolts out as soon as he’s able, realizing only then that he’s halfway through Ash and Smoke, the song he’s meant to skip on this soundtrack, and that he’s not sure how long he’s been holding his breath. 

He goes straight from not breathing to hyperventilating, raking in short, shallow, useless little breaths that leave him dizzy and lightheaded. The muscles in his arms are starting to tighten, his knees trembling, sharp pinpricks of electricity running up his spine to zap the back of his neck. 

The feeling is all too familiar. It means he needs to sit down before he falls down. 

Charlie leans back against the cool stone wall across from the tram, then slides down it until his knees are pressed to his chest. He switches to the next track—The Fields of Pelenor—and counts out his breaths to the drumbeat, slow and steady. One-two-three-four, Two-two-three-four, Three-two-three-four. His chest rises and falls in time with the music until he feels his jaw unclench. Even the exuberant chorus, the voices striding higher and higher, calms him. He knows what’s coming next. 

There are fewer people down here in the bowels of the airport, the dim, dingy maze-like hallways, and Charlie’s grateful for it. Periodically, a swarm of bodies descends the escalators and hurries en masse toward the Plane Train, then after that there's another period of calm, then the process repeats itself.

Charlie waits, and breathes, letting the music seep into him. This soundtrack is in his marrow; he knows it like his own mirror reflection. The bright, triumphant horns at the end of Pelenor, the low, foreboding notes at the beginning of Hope Fails, then the beautifully smooth rise of strings. Breathe in and slowly back out. The throngs of people ebb and flow, and Charlie’s okay. He’s okay. He can do this. 

He sips water when the space is empty enough that he feels safe lifting his mask, and braves a few bites of the bruised banana in his backpack.  

He’s starting to feel almost like a functional human being again when he notices, out of the corner of his eye, a glow; splashes of green, yellow and blue drifting from the next section of the corridor, over the moving walkway. The space is dim except for the colors dancing across the ceiling, drawing him in.

Charlie stands slowly enough that his feet won’t fail him, slings his bag over his shoulder, then crosses the dingy carpet, into what feels like it must be a hallucination.

But it’s real. He’s not the only one seeing it. Everyone in this section of hallway has their heads craned upward, taking in the sight of… whatever this is. Multicolor sargassum, jigsaw leaves, the hues shifting and changing from every angle, glittering above his head like Christmas lights. 

He’s on the moving walkway before he means to be, utterly spellbound. It’s a forest above his head, a digital-and-metal canopy suspended from the ceiling. Patches of light peek through in complimentary arrangements, green diffracting into blue and yellow; purple and blue and pink and orange swirling like the first flash of the sunrise. There are screens in the middle of all of it, spaced out every ten meters or so, projecting an image of clear blue sky with a bird or cloud drifting by. Charlie drifts past, his head turned up toward the not-forest. His worries drift away. 

Someone bumps into him—again—in the gap of music between Hope Fails and Black Gate Opens. Right, can’t stand still anywhere, not even here. He walks the last few steps to the end of the moving sidewalk, dragging his suitcase behind him as the colors spin into a dizzying whorl.

The section at the end is burnt out. Or– no, it's night, tiny pinpricks of yellow light twinkling in the black. Charlie steps off the sidewalk into night and takes a deep breath. A spotlight shines through the canopy like the cool blue glow of the moon, and on the screen the silhouette of a bat or an owl passes in front of a silver-gray cloud. 

The lone, high, tremulous note of a flute echoes in Charlie’s ears. He takes one earbud out, and he’s greeted with the faint sound of crickets and maybe, if he’s not imagining it, swaying reeds at the edge of a brackish marsh. 

The same scene hangs suspended over the next stretch of moving walkway as well, two connected hallways, glowing and vibrant, separated by dark. 

Charlie hurries down the next moving sidewalk before another traveler can jostle him and break the spell. The wheels of his suitcase hum zip-swish on the metal teeth of the sidewalk’s surface. He can feel each step up through his bones, connecting all the way to the top of his head as his body struggles to process the unnatural pace. Above him, a whole world chatters and chirps: birds and rustling leaves and the thrum of cicadas, like the digital display extends up through the layers of the building into actual sky. 

In his left ear, the melodic theme of the soundtrack resounds in brass, and Charlie feels part of something. He feels like he’s where he’s supposed to be. He feels, inexplicably, like something beginning.

At this rate he’ll miss his connecting flight; he’s peripherally aware of the fact, but he loops back around anyway, crossing the carpeted median to repeat the trip in the opposite direction. He’s almost sprinting now, the colors flying by, green–blue–yellow–pink–purple. When he gets to the end of that section he walks slowly across the midnight-dark, feeling like he’s on tiptoe. A family with five or six kids pushes past him, heads down, watching the chaos of their fourteen or sixteen feet. Charlie pities them. 

He moves onto the carpeted middle and follows the same path again, this time relying on his own (aching) feet. No one bumps into him. No kids with fake plastic swords knock his suitcase. No one growls “Excuse me,” in a tone that sounds more like “fuck you.” 

Charlie swims through the lights, the changing and shifting shapes of them behind the precision-cut outlines of metal leaves, and everything is okay. His heart slows. His breath reaches further down into his body, past his lungs and into his belly, even through the mask. He’s surrounded by thousands of other bodies, swarming like bees in a hive, busy with purpose, but he’s completely alone. 

He crosses night into light again, still walking at an analog pace. In his ear the harmonies build and transmute, familiar and well-worn. He wonders how many people have traveled this same stretch; how many people have found solace here. 

There’s time for one more loop before he has to get on the tram and let it carry him back to real life. Charlie waits until there's a clear stretch with no one in his way, then steps onto the human conveyor belt, letting it pull him forward. He strides easily with his head tipped so far back that his curls brush the tops of his shoulder blades, letting the visuals sear into him. He imagines how his face looks dappled by the lights, the same way it touches the faces of everyone around him. 

One stretch is all blue, with pops of pink and yellow and orange flickering behind it like salt water over seaweed and coral. The next is a field of crops past the point of harvest, bright warm yellow interspersed with flashes of green. In the shifting patterns, Charlie finds the colors of autumn, then the rainbow, then a single, persistent green–greener than actual leaves of actual trees–an almost radioactive neon. As he approaches the end of the sidewalk he allows himself a spin in place. Everything blurs. 

Stepping out of motion and onto solid ground, Charlie slams full-force into someone stopped in front of him. The man turns, first with his broad shoulders, then finally—almost reluctantly—he twists his head away from the vibrant display to look down at Charlie. Their eyes meet. 

The soundtrack has almost reached its resolution. The last few measures of The End of All Things reverberate, a sound like clouds parting.

The man’s amber eyes are lit up, glimmering with all the colors above them, like they’ve found a new home in him. The lights dance over his golden hair. He and Charlie aren’t the only people looking up, watching the not-skies, but Charlie can tell at just a glance that this is the only other person in the room feeling what he’s feeling. 

He’s also the only other person as far as Charlie can see in either direction who’s wearing a mask. 

Above them and under them the sky breaks with a crack of programmed thunder, raining down drops of light onto the dark concrete floor. It startles them; they both jump, almost into each other, then they burst out laughing. At their feet, yellow light spreads out in ripples, timed with the sound of pattering rain.  

“Um… hi,” the man says, still laughing. His voice is a solitary note in a sea of noise, the bright swell of strings in a symphony.

Charlie smiles at him, feeling like he’s finally reached his destination. “Hi.”