Chapter 4: EK006

At noon I was at Gate 14.

This is its own kind of information. Gate 14 was where it had started, twenty-four hours and what felt like a very different amount of time ago, and arriving there now was either a narrative convenience I was not going to overthink or a small joke by the universe that I was also not going to overthink.

The gate was staffed by different people — a morning shift and whatever this was, midday. The carpet was the same carpet. The chairs arranged in the same clusters of optimistic proximity. A family with two children occupied the far end. A businessman was asleep, spectacularly, across three chairs in the way only business-class passengers ever manage.

I found a seat. Window-facing — not the aircraft window, just the terminal window onto the stands where the gate's aircraft was not yet pulled in. I opened my laptop. I put one headphone in — just the one, which I was noting as a deviation from the system but not alarmed by.

I had a perfectly adequate thing to do. I had emails. I had the post-deck follow-up to write to the client. I had the week ahead to plan, the Thursday meeting I'd need to prepare for, the colleague whose draft I'd promised to look at when I was back in an actual office.

I typed the start of the client email.

Hi Margot — following up on the brand refresh. I think the framing we've been missing is —

I stopped.

I thought about the difference between being tall and being legible.

I thought about a man in a blue linen shirt holding a bracelet up to the light and saying: that one says something about the person who wears it.

I wrote the client email in eight minutes, which was half the time it normally took me, and sent it before I could redraft it, which I almost never do.

Alex arrived at twelve-seventeen.

I know the exact time because I was looking at the departure board when he walked through the gate entrance and I registered the time stamp the way you register things you are not supposed to be registering.

He saw me immediately. Not because I was signalling anything — I was on my laptop, one headphone in, the universal signal of not available — but because he walked into the gate and looked, with the easy attention he gave all spaces, and there I was.

He came over. He sat one seat away, which felt like a considered choice. Far enough to respect the headphone. Close enough to be adjacent.

I took out the headphone.

"You're early," I said.

"You're earlier."

"I have a system."

"I know," he said. "I built my timeline around it." He put down his bag — a black holdall, noticeably small for a man who had been in Singapore and then Dubai for the better part of a week. I looked at it.

"Carry-on?" I said.

"Always." He glanced at me. "We have more in common than you'd like."

"I haven't said I'd like anything."

"No," he said. "You haven't."

He took out his book — the airport paperback, unfinished, which he opened at what appeared to be roughly the midpoint. He read. I looked at my laptop. The boarding gate departure board showed EK006 on time, doors closing at one-thirty, and the specific relief that comes with an airline keeping its word.

We sat in the comfortable non-silence of two people who have run out of the need to fill space.

---

We were called to board at one-ten.

Priority boarding, which we both had, which meant we filed through ahead of the queue with the other priority passengers in the slightly embarrassing efficiency of people who have paid extra to get on a plane faster so they can sit in the same thin air for the same amount of time.

He was in 14A. I was in 14C.

I stopped in the aisle.

"Window seat," he said, already settled in A.

"I have a system," I said.

"I know about the system."

"The window seat is not optional."

He looked at the empty seat beside him — B, middle — and then at me. "This is a 3-4-3 configuration. If you'd like I can —"

"I'm in 14C," I said. "I booked it."

"You usually book window."

"I booked it two days ago after the cancellation and I was —" I stopped. I had been, at the time of booking, standing in the corridor outside room 715 and somewhat distracted, and I had done the rebooking quickly on my phone and apparently not checked the seat configuration. "I was in a hurry," I said.

He looked at me with the expression of someone carefully not smiling. "Would you like to swap to 14A?"

"You have the window seat."

"I don't require the window seat. I just sit there because it's available." He stood without ceremony and stepped into the aisle and gestured. "Please."

I looked at him. He had the easy patience of someone who has already decided the outcome and is simply giving me time to arrive at it.

"Thank you," I said. I took the window seat. He settled into C, which meant the middle seat — B — was between us, and remained empty as the row around us filled, because apparently even the boarding universe was participating in today's general theme.

"You'll want this back," he said, when we were settled and the seat belt sign was on. He held out — a clear plastic bag with an eye mask, earplugs, the small packaged items airlines issue to business class passengers. "They were going to take it away. I kept it."

"This is from the cancelled flight?"

"From the gate staff. They'd already distributed the welcome packs before the delay announcement." He paused. "I thought you'd want the mask."

"Why?"

"Because you seem like a person who can sleep on planes if the light is controlled."

I looked at the bag. I looked at him.

"You," I said, "are consistently too observant for someone I met yesterday."

"Day before yesterday," he said. "The thirty-six hour mark was at eleven this morning."

"I'm choosing not to count."

"That seems unlike you."

"I am making a specific exception," I said, and I took the eye mask and the earplugs and I put them in my bag, because he was right — I could sleep on planes, and the mask helped, and I was aware of the small warmth of the gesture and not going to make a performance of it.

The plane pushed back. The lights of Dubai International fell away below us as we climbed, and I had the window, and from the window I watched the city arrange itself into a pattern — the grid of the old city, the clustered towers of the new, the Burj Khalifa visible until we banked and the cloud came in and it was gone, blinking its patient way into the dark we were leaving behind.

"Goodbye, Dubai," I said, to the window.

"Will you come back?" Alex asked.

"Probably. For a conference." I paused. "The airport."

"Not like this," he said.

I looked at him. His face was in the middle-seat shadow, half-lit from the aisle. He was looking at me with the dark eyes and the expression that I had now had forty-eight hours to catalogue and still couldn't entirely name — attention, yes. Something warmer than curiosity. Something that had been building in the way of things that build incrementally until you notice them at once.

"No," I said. "Not like this."

---

An hour and a half into the flight, he fell asleep.

This is a detail I'm including because of what it said: he fell asleep easily, without apparent anxiety, in the way of a person who is not in a state of effortful wakefulness. His head tipped slightly toward B. His breathing changed. His hands were loose on his armrests.

He looked, asleep, like a version of himself with fewer decisions to make.

I had the eye mask on my forehead, not over my eyes. I was not asleep. I had my laptop open and was working, technically, in the sense that the document was visible and I was looking at it and occasionally typing words that may have constituted a sentence.

I was also aware that he was asleep beside me, which was an extremely neutral piece of information that I was somehow finding it impossible to be neutral about.

I thought about: the abra crossing, and the way he'd said nothing about the railing, just: reasonable. The souk, and the bracelet, and the difference between a gift that says something about the giver and a gift that says something about the wearer. The restaurant at one a.m. on Monday, the sea bass, the wine list, the moment when I'd said no, it's not a problem and he'd said good with a warmth I could feel at this distance.

I thought about Oslo. About calling him — the him of three years ago, the fading relationship — at six in the morning and saying the thing. About I know.

I thought about things known but unsaid.

He said he didn't stay on that side of the threshold anymore.

I put the eye mask over my eyes.

I did not sleep for a long time, but I rested, which was different, and in the resting I had the specific sensation of being somewhere between one thing and another — not on the plane exactly, not in London, somewhere transitional and quiet and not unhappy.

---

Six hours. London Heathrow. The particular grey of an English afternoon that I found, after eleven days and a twenty-four-hour delay, something very close to beautiful.

Arrivals. The channel that leads from the gate to passport control to the baggage hall, which neither of us needed, and then to the terminal where the world becomes again the place each of us has been waiting to get back to.

We walked through together.

There is a version of this moment — the airport exit, the parting — that is performed in a particular way in romantic comedies and was not how this happened. What happened was quieter than that: the corridor, the final gate, and then the arrivals hall and the sense of London already happening around us, the particular texture of Heathrow T3 after a long flight home.

We stopped.

"Tube?" he said.

"Tube," I said.

"Same direction, roughly."

"You're going south. I'm going north."

"Vauxhall," he said. "Initially, and then Clapham Junction."

"Victoria line," I said. "We'll go the same way as far as — "

"As far as Victoria, probably." He paused. "Can I ask you something?"

"Yes."

"Are you going to be difficult about this?"

I looked at him. "About — what specifically?"

"About whatever this is," he said. Not grandly. Just: directly. In the way of someone who has had, he said, a lot of time on the wrong side of the threshold. "We've spent two days in Dubai and I've found you consistently the most interesting person I've encountered in — I don't want to say how long, because the number might be alarming. And we're in the same city and I'd like to see you again." He paused. "And I'm asking directly, because I've learned it's better."

The arrivals hall went on around us. A family nearby was having a reunion. Someone's sign said a name that wasn't ours.

"How alarming is the number?" I said.

"I'll tell you when we know each other better."

"That's a very convenient position."

"It's a strategy," he said. "For the next conversation."

I looked at him. The eye mask was in my bag. The silver ring was on my right hand. The oud scent had faded through six hours at altitude, but I could remember it exactly.

I thought about the Oslo call and I know. I thought about things known but unsaid. I thought about a threshold.

"I'm not going to be difficult about it," I said.

He didn't react triumphantly. He just — received it, the way he received most things, with the steady attention of someone who takes things seriously without making a performance of the seriousness.

"Good," he said.

"I have a rule," I said.

"Tell me the rule."

"The rule is: I take two days to decompress after every trip. I answer no non-essential communication, I don't make plans, I eat toast and watch something with no narrative consequence and I re-enter myself." I paused. "Two days from now is Thursday."

"Thursday," he said.

"Thursday evening. If you want to get dinner."

"I want to get dinner," he said.

We walked to the tube. The Elizabeth line, as it turned out, rather than the Piccadilly, which was faster and equally convenient for both of us. We stood on the platform in the particular company of strangers who have just come off a long-haul flight and are each privately recalibrating to their own city.

The train came. We got on. He sat beside me — not beside me the way people sit beside strangers on public transport, with maximum spatial management, but beside me in the way of someone who has no particular reason to manage space around me.

We went through the dark underground.

At Paddington he looked at his phone. "My sister has already texted about the birthday," he said.

"She doesn't know what you've brought her yet."

"She'll find something to opine about regardless."

"How old will she be?"

"Twenty-six. Four years younger." He put his phone away. "She asks about everyone I meet. She's — involved."

"I have a friend like that," I said. "Clara. She'll want to know everything about Dubai in granular detail."

"What will you tell her?"

I considered this. The train moved through the dark. The overhead lights had that quality of late afternoon underground light that is neither flattering nor entirely unflattering, just: honest. Functional.

"I'll tell her about the Burj Khalifa," I said. "And the souk. And the abra."

"And?"

"And the hotel breakfast."

"And?"

"And that I met someone on the delayed flight who was more interesting than expected and whose company I didn't regret."

He looked at me. Something in his face that was — again the word — warm. "You didn't regret it."

"Significantly less than anticipated," I said.

The train reached Paddington. He stood. He had the black holdall and the easy posture and the dark eyes and the expression, and he looked at me and said:

"Thursday."

"Thursday," I said.

He got off. The doors closed. The train continued north.

I sat in the carriage going north and held my bag and looked at the window, which was dark tunnel and my own reflection. The ring on my right hand. The eye mask in my pocket.

Someone had left a newspaper on the seat beside me. I looked at it without seeing it. The train moved through the Underground and came up into the pale London afternoon and I watched the city arrive — the rooftops, the familiar skyline, modest and various and entirely, absolutely mine.

I thought: Thursday.

I thought: four hours wasn't enough.

I thought: it is now two and a half days, which is different from four hours.

I thought about this all the way to Highbury & Islington, and up the escalator, and out into the October street, and the walk to my flat, and the key in the door.

Clara was in the kitchen. "You're back early," she said. "How was Singapore?"

"Singapore was Singapore," I said. "Dubai was unexpectedly good."

"Dubai? You had a stopover?"

"Twenty-four hour delay," I said. "I'll tell you later." I put my bag down. "Do we have any bread?"

"Top cupboard. How was it? The delay?"

I thought about Gate 14. The shuttle. The thirty-seven-hour overlap between leaving London and returning to it, which had contained, somehow, more than most weeks.

"Educational," I said.

Clara gave me the look. "That tone has a story in it."

"Later," I said. "Tea first."

I made tea. I ate toast. I watched three episodes of something with no narrative consequence, as was my custom and right, and I texted two people who had been waiting to hear I'd landed, and I did not text Alex because I had a rule.

The rule was two days.

Two days from now was Thursday.

I was already thinking about Thursday in the specific way I thought about things I was looking forward to but was choosing not to rush toward. Not impatiently. Just: with a kind of attentive waiting, the way you look at a sentence before you've finished writing it — the end already known, the shape of it already there, the pen still moving.

I went to bed at ten and slept for eleven hours straight, which was the best sleep I'd had in two weeks, and I dreamed about nothing that I could name but woke up feeling like something had landed.

Which is not, I want to be clear, a conclusion. It's a beginning. The beginning of a thing that had already been beginning for two days, on a delay I hadn't planned, in a city I usually only pass through.

That's the thing about systems, I thought, opening my eyes to the grey London ceiling.

Sometimes the best data comes from when they fail.