Airport adverts

I dream of mile-long patterned carpets with floor-to-ceiling windows and the feeling I’ve forgotten something.

Three bottles of Prosecco and a popcorn sky in Prague. Billie and Cash and I talk about mile-high racism, as if hitting altitude changes the colour of your skin. Billie’s got a Prague pint and she’s taken it all the way to the gate. She darts her eyes around and pulls our heads down.

Never seen a white man get no funny looks, she says. But see a sand-nigger queue for the toilet, and it’s wet pants all round. My friend once brought a framed picture of his kid on board so when it happens, it’s a smash-glass-then-apply situation. The sky was safer with him around, Billie says.

She runs a finger along her throat.

So they can’t even take a shit now? Cash asks.

I feel they lost that right when they took a shit on the United States of America, Billie says, and Cash says, God bless.

Cash and Billie rub oil over each other at Gate 32 in another country, in another continent, where out the windows the sky sits a tiny bit different, lower or wider, more foreign, I don’t know. The airport adverts show smiling white women and children squished up against the glass looking at the same popcorn sky.

Six years ago, Billie saved a man’s life after he choked on Italian pine nuts at a restaurant in Brooklyn. When we asked her how she acted so fast, she shrugged. I don’t know, she said. When I see someone in trouble, I just help.

If you held her head out the window of an intercontinental until it exposed the wires in her brain, maybe I’d see how she’s dreaming of mile-long patterned carpets too, where none of us can reach the end without leaving part of ourselves behind.