Chapter One

1. THE EMPTY COFFEE CUP AND THE BABY TRAPPED IN THE CLOSET, IN DESCENDING ORDER OF IMPORTANCE

“EXCUSE ME SIR, the coffee machine is broken and there is a baby trapped in the closet on the other side of the room.”

I stared at the man who’d told me this as he waved his empty coffee cup at me. First of all, as a matter of common decency, I would’ve thought the first problem communicated would be the one about the trapped kid, then maybe throw in the bit about the coffee machine. Second, there hadn’t been any children in the room all morning. Third, the closet he was referring to was always locked. It wasn’t even a closet; it was a door that led to a flat panel of electrical boards and fuses. It was impossible for a child to fit behind it. Lastly, the guy just looked like a weasel. Corporate homunculus. Swollen with complaints. It was a common enough archetype. 

It was a Tuesday morning in the Sky lounge, one of the nine private rooms in the world’s busiest airport, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International. The lounges were the exclusive property of the biggest Air Line in town, set up to pamper their frequent fliers, usually business folk and people of relative notoriety. Children, the progeny of the privileged, were rarely in there unless it was a holiday weekend or spring break. It was highly unlikely that an infant was trapped behind an impenetrable door. But what the hell? No complaint was too outrageous.

I was the bartender. I tended the bar. The actual task, though, is almost irrelevant to my story. I simply describe my formal role to explain how I got caught in the middle of it all. More importantly I was an observer. An anthropologist. An anesthesiologist. A therapist. A bouncer. A wiseacre. And, considering the pace and quantity of booze consumed by all these people, half the time I felt like Dr. Kevorkian, or Michael Jackson’s doctor, whatever his name is, knocking people out with no regard for waking them back up again. I was also there for a story. Some type of creative inspiration. I had already written and destroyed a hundred novels in my head and I needed the Muses to start singing. I needed the divine spark. I considered traveling the world but that would’ve cost more money than I was willing to spend. Instead I parked myself at an airport with something like ninety million travelers a year passing through it. The world, in a way, came to me.

Most of the complaints I dealt with had nothing to do with the bar, anyway. It was always some freaky gripe like the air in the room was always too hot for the obese while being too cold for the elderly. The television was always too loud, not loud enough, or on the wrong channel. Somebody got their head stuck in a suitcase, or at least got their hair stuck in the zipper of their suitcase. Somebody missed their flight because they were flying to “Daytona” and they were mistakenly monitoring the flight to “Dayton,” which was somehow the reckless fault of whoever was in charge of naming cities. The rooms never had enough biscotti cookies, usually because people would grab whole sleeves of these things and stuff them in their carry-on bags. Yet by far the most common complaint was when a person would condescendingly ask why the club was always out of the one thing he or she was always looking for, and would mildly huff when it was demonstrated that the club did indeed have it, and that the reason he or she couldn’t find it was because it was right in front of his or her face. 

Now, to the task at hand! I waded through the new crop of middling emergencies. In addition to the coffee machine and the kid jammed in the closet slowly suffocating, the vat of oatmeal was empty. Somebody had unleashed a toxic cloud in the bathroom, which happened every ten minutes or so, and one of the televisions had gone wonky, my very technical term for stubborn electronics. Another fellow all geared up with his telephone strapped to his face was hunting for an outlet to plug himself into while in the middle of a phone call. Not being able to find one he began performing a bizarre, silent shrugging dance at me, waving the pronged phone plug in his hand like a raver wields a glow stick. His voice never faltered as he gyrated. The person on the other end of his call would never know how ridiculous he looked considering how serious he sounded.

Meanwhile I was being engulfed by caffeine-starved passengers in various stages of panic.

“The coffee machine is broken.”

“The coffee machine is broken.”

“The coffee machine is broken.”

“The coffee machine is broken.” The mob grew increasingly restless. All of them had walked up to me and pointed at the coffee machine, then handed me their empty coffee cups. People were always handing me their empty coffee cups for some reason.

“Practitioners of patience, lend me your ears,” I announced.

“Broken!” they shouted.

“Friends, rest assured that the coffee machine is not broken. It just needs to be refilled.”

“I’m hitting the button and it’s not working,” said a very polished and dapper man, jamming his finger into the button on the machine as hard as he could. When that didn’t work he planted his feet firmly on the ground and leaned diagonally into the button, forming the hypotenuse of a right triangle between the floor and the machine itself, exerting the fullness of his weight. Still no coffee.  

“Yes. That means the coffee machine must be refilled, not fixed,” I told him.

“It seems broken to me. Why else would there be no coffee?”

“So let me get this straight,” I said. “When your car runs out of gas do you take it to the mechanic and tell him it’s broken or do you take it to the gas station and refill it?”

“My chauffeur does all that stuff. What he doesn’t do is talk back.” The man straightened himself up and pulled out his electronic griper to no doubt send a message to the Air Line complaint department about my insolence. His thumbs went to work, typing furiously.

I thought I’d made a decent point. Furthermore, even someone with a chauffeur would have to understand the elementary mechanics of refueling a car. If a person was smart enough to afford a driver they were smart enough to figure out basic vehicle maintenance. I figured it was just his way of letting everyone know he had a chauffeur.

“You must be new here,” he told me as he typed. “So let me explain. I’m a Diamond member. Do you know what a Diamond is?”

“A shiny rock that, like your humble servants, doesn’t talk back.” 

His skin turned purple with rage.

“I’m best friends with the CEO!” he barked.

“Impressive,” I said, although I only meant it was impressive that he could spell CEO, considering he was a bit mystified by a gas tank.

“Start looking for another job,” he said. “I’m going to get the Air Line to fire you.”

“Actually,” I said, “I don’t work for the Air Line.”

Which was true. I didn’t work for them. The Air Line had contracted out the bartenders, in fact all the hospitality staff to another company, so even though I was working in the club I didn’t actually work for the company that owned the club. It was a fine line. Sure I could’ve gotten fired by the Air Line because they were the client of my company. They called the shots and they were quite punctilious about it. But after a while the casual threats of termination from passengers who swore they were best friends with every executive imaginable lost their strength. Even if I did get fired I would only have to endure a fifteen minute police escort, then I would be free to do whatever I wanted. I wondered what I would talk to the cops about as we marched through the concourse, and if they’d be at all receptive to my inquiries. I’d have to ask them about the craziest thing they’d ever seen. After all, the world’s busiest airport had to also be the world’s biggest petri dish of human behavior, always breeding new and interesting strains of idiocy.

The man in front of me was still seething. He explained that he would shortly be getting confirmation of my dismissal.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Today is my last day anyway,” which was a lie, but effective enough. 

The man looked at me for a moment, then put his phone away and stomped off.

While all this was happening one of the room attendants sneaked a new box of “coffee” into the coffee machine. I had tried it once, the “coffee,” and even though it was brown and wet, it was a far cry from real coffee. It was more like an acidic chemical sludge that could either be consumed or used to clean barnacles off naval destroyers. (Author’s note–Since my time working at the clubs the management has made some significant changes. The coffee served nowadays is actual coffee, not a corrosive poison that rots people from the inside out. Every once in a while the place gets it right, although it usually takes years.)  

I went over to the machine and filled a cup like I was Jesus of Nazareth at a wedding.

“Hallelujah,” I said as the crowd jockeyed for position. I handed the “coffee” to the guy who had complained about the coffee machine and the locked child in the closet. We had solved one problem. The most serious one, it seemed.

“Thanks,” he said, “but really this child will not stop whining. I have a meeting in Philadelphia at noon and I have to get some work done.”

“You are referring, of course, to the child that, as we speak, is slowly being starved of air in a cramped little cubby?”

“Something has to be done.”

“You’re right. Let’s be heroes.”

“Also the television has a big weird block in the middle of the screen and I can’t get rid of it.”

“Well, sir, it’s up to you. Would you like me to figure out the television thing or the trapped kid thing?”

I could tell he didn’t want to admit the television was more important to him, as another passenger walked up to us. 

“The TV is screwed up,” said the new guy. “It has this computer code gibberish all over it.”

“As opposed to the regular gibberish. Okay, give me a minute and I’ll be right over.”

The first guy and I walked over to the door in the back of the club while the second guy went to stand near the television. I reached the door and put my ear to it. There was no sound. The guy who had complained about the phantom kid was standing behind me, sipping his “coffee.” The door was locked. I looked around. There was a thin, neatly groomed man with spectacles sitting close by. He had a small, aerated carrier on the chair next to him. 

“Sir, have you heard anything like a child whining behind this door?” I said.

“No,” he said. “But I have heard the occasional mewling of my kitty cat in his little cage right here.”

I turned to the corporate homunculus standing behind me. He shrugged.

“How about that?” he said. “It was only a cat.” He gave me a cross-eyed look and just went back to being himself in all his strange and hysterical illogic. With nothing else to say, he took another sip of “coffee.”

Just then a huge bang came from the other side of the room. The man who had been standing next to the television had become too impatient and, while trying to access the back of it in order to diagnose the problem, had ripped it off the wall. All things considered it was a pretty routine Tuesday morning…