Last Call at Gate 14

The speaker above Gate 14 crackled again and said something in Korean, and I sat there in a vinyl chair with my hoodie bunched under my hip and understood exactly none of it. Doesn't matter. Canceled is canceled in any language. The board behind me was glowing red as if the whole thing was on fire, my name on it somewhere in the middle of that mess, and the only other people left in the waiting area were a couple of guys asleep on the floor by the pillars like their bodies had just given up on standing.

My flight to Manila was supposed to leave at 9:40. It was now pushing 3 in the morning and the gate agent had said twelve hours, maybe more, and had said it with a shrug like that was just weather, which I guess it was. Typhoon thing out over the Pacific, reroutes, chaos, nothing to do with me except that it had eaten my whole connection.

So I did what I do. I got up and I walked. Walking is what I do when a day goes sideways, and lifeguards know a thing or two about hours of sitting around waiting for nothing, believe me. At least on the tower there's an ocean to look at. Here there was a long empty corridor of shut gates and gray carpet and that airport hum, the one that's never actually quiet, just low enough that you stop hearing it after ten minutes.

The duty-free store was still open. Half the lights were off inside but a girl behind the register was watching something on her phone and she waved me in with a lazy hand, like sure, come wander, buy nothing, I don't care. So I did. I walked the perfume aisle first, because the perfume aisle in an empty airport at 3 a.m. is a special kind of lonely, all that glass and gold and nobody spraying anything. Then I got to the food section and picked up a box of ginseng tea, red and gold, and turned it over in my hands like I was going to read it. I don't even drink tea. I was just touching things to prove I still had hands.

That's when I saw him. Far end of the aisle, backlit by that big glass wall that looks out on the tarmac, and he was just standing there, not shopping, not looking at anything. All hard angles. Coat hanging off his shoulders, still as a fence post, and the blue glow of the runway light behind him made him look cut out of the dark instead of standing in it.

I don't usually stare at men. I see men all day, half of them drowning, and you learn to look at people without looking. But this guy had a stillness to him, the kind I only ever saw on old surfers and one bartender in Ensenada, and my eyes stuck on him before my brain got a vote.

Then he turned his head and I got the face. High cheekbones. A thin scar through one eyebrow, old and white. Eyes slate gray, flat and calm, and I felt this jolt in my chest, this stupid recognition, like I knew him from somewhere. Except I didn't. I've never been to Hong Kong, I've never worked with a journalist, there is no possible thread between this man and me. And still my body reacted like we'd met before and I'd liked it.

He nodded at me. Small nod, almost nothing.

"Hey," I said, because apparently my mouth was running this part of the night without me.

"Hey." His voice was a low rasp, like it had been sitting in a plane for a lot of hours. "You know if anything's still open past security? Besides this."

"I think the lounge on the second floor is twenty-four hours. The one with the window."

"That's the one with the window." He said it like he was filing it away. "I've been walking in circles for a while."

"Twelve-hour layover will do that. Or worse, apparently. Mine's twelve and my flight's dead."

"Mine too. Kai." He didn't put a hand out. Just said the name and let it sit there, which I appreciated, because I was still holding a box of tea like an idiot.

"Felicia."

"Good name."

"It's from a movie. My mom liked the movie more than she liked naming babies." I put the tea back on the shelf. "You want to go find this lounge, or are you committed to standing there till dawn?"

He smiled. Barely, but it got there. "I could be convinced."

* * *

The lounge was up an escalator and around a corner, a long low room with a bar that had one guy working it and a curved wall of windows looking out over the whole gray tarmac. There were maybe six people in the place, scattered wide apart like they'd negotiated territory. Kai picked a table. I picked the one next to it, which was a decision I made on purpose and then pretended I hadn't.

"You want coffee?" he asked when we'd settled. "The machine over there looks like it still has faith in itself."

"That machine's been empty since midnight. I came through here a couple hours ago."

"You know what time it restocks?"

"No idea," I said, which was a lie, because I'd asked the bar guy already and he'd told me four, and I wanted the conversation to keep going and figured a dead coffee machine was a reason to stay put. So I said no and stayed. Fine. I'm not proud, I'm honest, those are different things.

He got two waters instead and set one on my table without asking, just slid it across like we'd been sharing an office for years. That was the gesture. A water. It shouldn't have landed the way it landed.

"So what's a lifeguard doing flying to Manila alone at midnight," he said, and I laughed before I could stop it.

"How do you know I'm a lifeguard?"

"You've got the shoulders, the tan lines, and the half-moon scar on your forearm from a rescue tube clip. My sister was one in Oahu for three summers. I'd bet money."

"That's a creepy amount of correct." I pulled my sleeve up an inch without thinking and there it was, the little white crescent. "Yeah. San Diego, eleven years. You're a detective or something?"

"Journalist. Was. Hong Kong, mostly, until last year."

"Until last year what?"

He looked out at the tarmac, and a plane was pushing back somewhere down the line, all orange lights and slow movement, and he watched it the whole way before he answered.

"Until the paper got bought and the bureau closed and I came home to a country I hadn't lived in for nine years. Now I fly a lot and I don't have a great answer for why."

"That's the most honest thing anyone's said to me in an airport."

"Low bar in an airport."

"Low bar everywhere, lately." I turned my water bottle in my hands. "So where you headed, since you fly a lot for no reason?"

"Bangkok. You?"

"Manila. My sister married a Filipino guy two years ago and I keep meaning to visit and never do. This was supposed to be the trip."

"And now the typhoon's got it."

"And now the typhoon's got it." I looked at him across the gap between the tables. He was maybe 33, hard to say, and a man who can sit in silence without needing to fill it had a quality. "Can I ask you something weird?"

"You already have."

"Fair. When I saw you in that aisle, I thought I knew you. Which is impossible. Has that ever happened to you, where a stranger feels like a rerun?"

He was quiet a second. Not a comfortable quiet either, but he didn't dodge.

"Once," he said. "Marrakech, a few years back. Woman at a train station. I was sure I'd met her. I hadn't. I married her, as it turned out. Then un-married, longer story, worse story."

"I don't need the worse story."

"Good. It's not free." He finished his water and set the bottle down. "It's almost four. The coffee machine, I'm told, restocks at four."

"How would you be told that?"

"The bar guy told me when I came in. Before you did."

I stared at him. "So you knew, and you still asked me if I knew what time it restocks?"

"Yeah." He didn't smile this time, but the gray eyes had something moving in them. "Worked, didn't it?"

I should've been embarrassed. I wasn't, mostly. I got up and we walked over together and the machine was still dead even at four, blinking its little red light like it was part of the canceled flight board now, everything in this airport running on the same bad news.

"Great," I said. "So we waited twenty minutes for nothing."

"We didn't wait for coffee," Kai said, and pulled out a chair at the window table for me, and I sat down in it, and outside the sky over the tarmac had just barely started going from black to that ugly airport gray, and I thought, well. Eleven hours left. Might as well find out who this guy is.

We talked for an hour and it didn't feel like an hour. It felt like twenty minutes until I checked the departure board again and saw the typhoon still sitting over the Pacific like it owned the place, and realized it was pushing five.

"So you covered typhoons," I said. "Like actual typhoons, standing out in them?"

"Standing out in them is stupid, but yes. Cebu, 2013. You find a concrete stairwell and you film through a window until the window isn't a window anymore."

"And then what?"

"Then you go out and do the piece to camera in the wind, because the anchor in the studio needs to see you soaked to make it real for people sitting in dry kitchens."

"That's messed up."

"That's television." He shrugged like it was somebody else's life, which I guess it was now. "The storm was the easy part. The week after was the part that stuck. Everybody wants the storm. Nobody camps out for the week after."

I leaned my elbows on the table without deciding to. Somewhere in that hour I'd turned my chair so I was facing him full on, and my body had drifted forward a couple inches at a time like it had its own plan and hadn't cleared it with me. "What else?"

"What else do you want?"

"Riots. You said riots."

"Hong Kong, mostly. You stand on a corner and you learn to read a crowd. When it's going to break, there's a sound it makes right before. Like a wave about to go over."

"I know that sound," I said. "Different beach, same sound. You get the same feeling in your chest when a rip current sets up and there's forty people in the water who don't see it yet."

He looked at me different after that. Not softer exactly. More level, like he'd moved me from one