Outbound

Morning.

Time travel is mostly waiting, so Bryan leaned against the faux marble pillar and waited. His official designation was specifically a Counter, so he kept an eye on the Burger King across the concourse and made a token effort at tracking the customers that petered away from the counter in fits and spurts. According to the black tick marks on his notepad, two hundred and eighty-eight chicken sandwiches sold (ninety-five of them spicy) so far today.

He knew from experience that the first hour or so was OK. During that hour, people were terse and standoffish, they sized you up, looking for a reason to raise their shrill, little voices. Unpleasant, but navigable. After about ninety minutes of waiting though, those shrill voices would start to rise one impossible octave higher and then another, badgering each other into an irrepressible chain reaction of irritability that would sweep through the Atlanta airport in minutes. At almost exactly the three-hour mark, the call would come down formally canceling all flights for the day. But the fireworks didn’t really start until tomorrow. Today, the hapless PA operator was unaware that nestled within the bad news he was delivering, stranded passengers would hear the all-important promise that the planes would be back in flight tomorrow, which Bryan knew was simply not to be.

Warning signs were starting to show at Gate B3. A man wearing cargo shorts and a purple hoodie sat with his back against the windows, staring past the crowd at something only he could see. Apparently overwhelmed by his vision of a future lost, he lowered himself and lay face-down on the floor, his hood lolling. Passersby jostled against each other, hoping to avoid his prostrate body if at all possible, but sometimes you have to break a few eggs.

“It was so good of you to come,” Shelly says, in a tone that suggests maybe just call next time. She switches the coffeepot on and swivels to the opposite counter to unstack one tower of dishes and make another. She keeps her back to him.

Bryan purses his lips sympathetically, noncommittally. It feels like the right gesture, even though Shelly won’t look right now. He sort of wishes he had some dishes to stack just right, instead of just twirling his stupid work lanyard around.

“So, uh, how’s little Garrett doing? He must be what, eight or nine now?”

Shelly lowers a plate edgewise, slow but forceful. It cracks against the next in the pile, but she keeps pressing down, undeterred by the squeaks of grinding porcelain.

“Respectfully, and I do mean respectfully, why show up here, Bryan?”

Afternoon.

Bryan sighed and checked his watch, as if he might be surprised by the result. The man with his nose buried in airport carpet grunted at an errant foot, but otherwise refused to acknowledge his behavior. A growing commotion at the Burger King across the aisle made Bryan realize that he had gotten distracted by Purple Hoodie again, but there was just something about the audacity of it all that he couldn’t look away from. Like moths to a flame, more passengers began drifting from their gates towards the Burger King, grousing among themselves at the indignity of an airport eatery running out of chicken sandwiches. Bryan added an arbitrary number of tick marks to his count that felt like about the right number to duck scrutiny when he brought the number back to his home office and walked towards the Burger King, hands jammed into his pockets. He wasn’t hungry yet, but it was now or never for lunch today.

He cut a stereotypical figure, dressed in a pale blue polo shirt, a pair of bulky cargo shorts splattered with buttons, and high-end loafers that clicked against the floor smartly as he picked up speed. A neck pillow hung round his plain face and short-cropped hair completed the look, a picture of harried domesticity. In a job with too few perks, he made a point of enjoying the costuming.

Counter was a decent living, respectable if not prestigious, but there was no denying that it was a downright trite use of time travel. Years of corporate streamlining had long stripped all the grandeur away from the miracle technology. These days, using time travel for something as quaint as observing a long extinct animal species was exclusively the province of wealthy schoolchildren. Instead, companies had realized that everything that made data collection valuable going forwards could also be applied backwards. With time travel, an opportunity never passed and no limitation was ever reached. And while it could be crushingly boring, Bryan supposed it was better than being a Buyer. He was here as an observer, a scientist even. There was something deeply artificial about Buyers, sent back to mundane moments in ordinary airports just to pump up the numbers. Imagine standing in a line like this every day! What do you even do with yet another vintage chicken sandwich? Eat the ghastly thing, he supposed. Bryan bought a sandwich and sat at a table sticky with some forgotten liquid and bolted to the floor.

“It gets better,” someone said, as if reading his mind. A man with deep set eyes and tousled dark hair protruding from a ball cap gestured towards the sandwich and took a seat opposite of Bryan. “This slop, I mean.”

Bryan struggled to make sense of what he was seeing. After a moment, his mouth formed the words, stupid and obvious as they were.

“Dave? You’re supposed to be dead, gone down in that plane this morning.”

Dave nodded because this was true.

“I had to get out. Faking being on that airplane was the only way I could figure it.”

Bryan stood and pushed in his chair, its metal legs scraping across on the floor. Most of his sandwich lay on the table, forgotten. Dave jumped up too and grabbed his arm, tight.

“Please, Bryan. I’m just looking for a little help, no one at the office needs to know about this. Just one thing and I promise I won’t bother you again. You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about leaving too. I could help you stay here too, if you wanted.”

At this, Bryan shoved Dave’s hands away.

“Who says I’m trying to stay behind?”

Dave smiled with no warmth behind it.

“Well, isn’t everyone trying to stay behind? I’m just saying, it’s not that hard, I could show you how. Next time, even. But please, take this letter to my wife first.” He pushed a crimped envelope into the other man’s unwilling hand.

“Why are you telling me this? I don’t want to know.”

Bryan lurched away from the table and dove headlong into the crowd, anything to get away from the encounter. But he held onto the letter.

“Why are you telling me this? I don’t want to know.”

Shelly still hasn’t turned around to face Bryan. The kitchen faucet is running and Bryan can hear the hot water splattering against the basin and for a moment all he wants in the world is to reach over and turn it off. But he just stands there, like the only schoolboy that got caught, preparing to accept punishment on behalf of the whole group.

Shelley’s breathing is constricted, threatening to break into a sob. She staves it off and when she speaks again, she’s cold and distant. She hasn’t touched the envelope.

“You don’t know what it’s like not having any other option than now. Dave could choose and it was my job to pretend he couldn’t.”

“Shelly, it isn’t like that.” Bryan raises his hand in a strange half-gesture as if trying to pantomime comfort and submission at once, but achieving neither.

The catch in her throat is gone now. Her back is straight, her shoulders square. This is an insult, not hiding, not saving face.

“I think you should leave, Bryan.”

Night.

The airport had descended into a morass of waiting queues. Everywhere, people stood about drumming their fingers and checking their watches, waiting for an audience. Twin lines snaked out from the boarding kiosk and collapsed into other lines emanating from swamped restrooms and overrun restaurants serving whatever odds and ends could still be found. Though progress was glacial, actually standing in any of these lines was an active process, as each participant needed to toggle between nudging other supplicants away and bracing oneself against oncoming nudges. The center walkway thrummed with bodies unconvincingly attempting to merge into something more orderly, an ouroboros of human impatience.

This made it very difficult for Bryan to reach the vending machines scattered across the terminal, which in turn, made it very difficult for Bryan to count the remaining contents of said machines. He struggled to keep his mind on the job at hand, but then again, it’s hard to take a day seriously the fifth time around. Someone always had to take the fall for an incident like this and it seemed ridiculous that it should be him, minding his own business ticking off packages of Cheez-its. He didn’t even know Dave that well! And now he was probably already on some kind of internal watchlist.

Bryan squeezed between a revolving newsstand and a would-be passenger, or possibly an on-the-clock time traveler. Either way, the woman had stationed herself in precisely the right spot to throw her head back and stare at the ceiling, a top 40 country station warbling from her phone.

“Excuse me,” Bryan said, as he twisted his shoulders to fit snugly in the small space provided while still maintaining a reasonable view of a vending machine. He resolved to add two tick marks whenever the congested foot traffic blocked his view.

The woman turned to stare at him, grimacing but letting Luke Combs do the talking.

“I mean, I can double-check those reports. I don’t mind; we all have to go back again from time to time.” Bryan chuckles unconvincingly to reinforce the truism.

“You’re not in trouble,” the HR woman repeats, “so long as you do your best to assist our investigation. How long have you known Dave?”

Her hands are poised over an undersized keyboard. The nails are unnaturally slender and pointed, painted a deep ocean blue.

“I don’t really. Different departments, we both have kids, you know how it is.”

She sniffs. “I remind you once again, that I do not ‘know how it is.’ That is why we are conducting this interview.”

“Right. So, uh, not very long?”

“Is that a question?”

“No.”

She types, pauses, and types some more in a staccato register that Bryan can’t help but feel is ominous.

“Did Dave ever say anything you found troubling? Even as a joke?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t really know the guy. No, I guess.”

More typing. A lot more.

“And did Dave ever tell you he planned to stay behind?”

“No.”

“Would you ever stay behind?”

“You didn’t write anything down for my last answer.”

She flexes her fingers, letting each digit flare out to its full extension and back again.

“Is that how you want to answer the question?”

“No.”

“Do you still have the letter he asked you to deliver?”

Though arguably (definitionally) nothing about the day had ever been in any doubt, midnight still came as a relief to Bryan. The air was heavy and still, punctuated by the scrabbling of restless passengers in various states of undress, erecting makeshift beds wherever space could be found. They lay across dining tables, heads atop sweatshirts carefully bunched into a stubby approximation of pillow, and turned their backs to the crowd, hoping to blot out their surroundings with indifference.

Bryan picked his way through these temporary bedrooms, careful to take a meandering route that doubled back on itself senselessly and checked for anyone who might be following him, as per his training. The crush of human bodies lessened as he worked his way deeper into the secret recesses of the airport, passing through credential checkpoints, closets that improbably widened into hallways, and mislabeled doors. He genuinely enjoyed the exit procedure and this daily ritual was a comfort to him. Sometimes a man just wants to disappear for a while.

Eventually, he reached the lonely place where the time machine was kept. He sighed, opened his notebook, and studied the rows of tick marks, as if he might be surprised by the result. His counts were all over the place, a jumbled record of the day he had actually had, rather than the one his employer sanctioned. There was nothing for it, he would have to go back and count again.