The Elephant in the Room

Sam was at the airport. Sam hated the airport. 

Everything about it made his skin crawl: the smells (harsh and discordant), the sounds (tinny and overwhelming), and, finally, the people (paradoxically both obnoxious and boring). 

He hated the people most of all. He wasn’t the biggest fan of them generally, but he could get through a business meeting or purchasing a coffee. At the airport, however, the whole lot of them were in fine form, chattering loudly on phones and slurping on straws and crunching on snacks and standing where they should walk and walking where they should stand. Someone was always arguing about something inane, like why they couldn’t bring a pack of stainless steel toothpicks into the cockpit or the tax rate on a pack of peanut butter cups. 

Overall, he’d rather stab his eyes out than deal with the whole thing, but his 90% perfect, 90% work from home job that paid him enough to purchase a nice-sized home on a good plot of land (far away from anyone else) required 10% travel. 

To make things as painless as possible, he had a system. His carry-on was packed days before with two changes of pants, shirts, and socks, and five pairs of underwear (he didn’t like the hotel washing the last). It was stocked year round with extra chargers, a spare toothbrush, backups of his medications, and deodorant. There would be no baggage check or claim for him. He also had his phone, tablet, and an audaciously-sized pair of headphones that did make for nice listening if he was feeling jazzy, but mostly acted as a neon sign telling friendly passerby to keep moving. 

Sam had learned long ago that, outside of the few friends he’d had since high school and saw, at best, biannually, he just had no use for people. He did not want to see their children or their lawns, listen to their political views, or be preached to about their gods. He was perfectly happy with his work and his books and video games, thank you very much. 

He arrived at his gate, early, as usual, and already positively steaming. The security line had been held up by a gaggle of seemingly unaccompanied children and an elderly couple that, by the looks and speed of them, had last flown sometime in the Carter administration. By the time he’d collapsed into one of the most uncomfortable seats in the world, leaving an extra-wide berth between himself and a mother with her infant and a cheerful older gentleman he’d witnessed asking about the college plans of the dead-eyed gate attendant, Sam was thoroughly done with all of it. 

His headphones were on before he even opened his laptop. 

At first, he didn’t even put on any sound. The feeling of the quiet closing over his ears was bliss. These weren’t entirely noise-canceling headphones – he still wanted to be able to tell if the announcements were on — but they were enough to dull the sharpness of it all. For the first time since he’d taken the highway exit with signs pointing towards the airport, Sam felt ordered in the chaos.

He opened Excel. Looking at financial reports would be sure to calm his nerves. Sam liked numbers. They did what you told them to, and, for the most part, what you expected of them. He knew some of the more theoretical branches of the subject got a little unwieldy, but the math he used on a regular basis: what came in and what went out and what was taxable at what rates and and how much to file where, weren’t exactly simple, but the complication wasn’t the numbers themselves. A 5 always behaves as a 5. It wasn’t the 5s fault that sometimes no one knew where to find it or what it meant. 

He was just settling into a nice, long spreadsheet meditation when someone sat down next to him. Not directly next to him – one seat over– but still. He’d sat in the very center of two gates, a bank of seats on either side, for the obvious and express purpose of having some space. 

And she was talking on a phone. Fantastic. 

For a moment, he fumed, deaf and mute. The lady reminded him of his aunt Betty, all big lips and big hair in shades of orange that were just south of natural. She held a smartphone to her ear with long talon-like fingernails, painted a mauve color that clashed violently with her hair. She smacked her lips as she talked, as though she were chewing gum. 

Sam stared at her ear, hating her with such an intensity that it seemed amazing that she couldn’t feel it. Smoke should have been pouring out of her ears. 

Despite all of this, however, Sam had been raised to be a gentleman by his father and his mother’s catholic guilt had never quite left him (though he had abandoned the god long ago), and he found he just couldn’t move away from her. It seemed somehow disrespectful to his Aunt Betty, who was, herself, something of an insufferable chatterbox. 

Instead, he suffered in silence. 

As he accepted his fate, however, the single-mindedness of rage began to melt away.  Other observations began to slip in. 

He first noted the irritating tenor of her voice, high and shrill but with a ruggedness he associated with years of chain smoking.

Then, the words hit him.

“Well, it wasn’t a whole elephant,” a pause, “no, it exploded.”

His mouse, which had been hovering over the icon to open his music app, froze; his fingers went still on the keys. 

There was… no way he’d just heard that right?

“No, after that she asked him to move out. Gave the ring back and everything.”

Oh good. He most certainly hadn’t, then.. Must have been a trick of the muffled headphone sound. 

He couldn’t for the life of him figure out what she had said, but he was trying to convince himself not to think about it too much. Some smooth jazz it was.

“No, it exploded.”

Well, she definitely said “exploded” that time, there was no denying it. He was still certain he had misheard the part about the elephant, but almost despite himself, Sam was intrigued. 

Her next words were slightly softer, conspiratorial, and Sam found himself leaning in. 

“Well yeah, the elephant was the last straw. She told him “it’s me or that thing, mister.”

Sam’s hands were limp on the keyboard now, his music forgotten. 

That would put a strain on any relationship – he supposed wildly, the thought making him feel insane. 

He looked around to see if anyone else was witnessing this, but aside from a college-aged youth passed out, catlike, in a ball around his backpack, the row was empty. 

For a moment, she listened and Sam puzzled. And it wasn’t a whole elephant? Had the elephant exploded? Had that caused the relationship to end?

He pushed the right side of his earphones further back on his ear as she opened her mouth to speak again, tangerine lips stretching over yellow-chicklet teeth.

“No, no, it needs at least two cups of sugar, otherwise it won’t hold together right.”

Had he fallen asleep? No, his back still ached from a car crash years ago, and his nose was itchy. 

All pretense of work was gone now. He was flat out staring at her, but she didn’t seem to notice.

There was exasperation in the voice now, “No, I keep telling you, it exploded.”

The sheer amount of things that would need to be said by the person on the other line to connect those two things…

The Aunt Betty look alike said something else, but it was covered up by the tinny sound of the boarding announcement. Please have your passes in hand.

First class, that was him. 

Sam had never been more disappointed. 

Slowly, he packed up his laptop and collected his things, lingering long enough that they had already called for boarding group two before he had finished. 

But now the other plane was loading as well, and the announcements for both gates kept dwarfing even her shrill voice. Though he did hear bits about explosions (which apparently her companion was still refusing to believe had happened) and, even more inexplicably, the planet Neptune, he eventually regretfully decided that he would have to go. She too had gotten to her feet. Boarding group three to Tallahassee. 

As he watched her walk away from him, to the opposite gate, it was with a feeling he had not had in some time. It wasn’t exactly wonder, but it wasn’t exactly not that, either.

He found he wished he was going to Tallahassee. He wanted to learn more about the couple broken up by the elephant and the explosion. He wanted to find out what on earth had been going on on the other side of the line and where the sugar and the planets came in. Had he just run into some sort of poltergeist, a demon on earth meant to confuse, or just the embodiment of well -Florida woman- he guessed? He found he wanted to know. 

Maybe there was some magic left in the world after all.

As Sam made his way to his exclusive, expensive seat, late - for the first time in, well, ever- he reached for his headphones.

And he didn’t put them on.

He wondered if anyone wanted to talk about elephants.