5/23/26 - A Sign of the Times

I remember being in an airport. Sterile overhead yellow-white lights blended with the setting sun and the blur of anonymous crowds busily walking to their destinations, lone figures speaking on their phones, groups a mess of colors and voices. Entranced by the fuzzy lingering of barely delineated multitudes among stores, gates, and hallway, I sought to rest my arm on something solid and realized then that I had misplaced my purse.

Knowing myself to be clumsy and forgetful, I immediately assumed that I had dropped it at my assigned gate. I stepped into the mass of bodies and became one with the horde of urgent commuters, walking with purpose until an officer with a nondescript uniform caught my eye. He carried two bags: a professional briefcase, and my orange-brown leather purse.

I turned on my heels and ran after him but stopped myself from following him into the men’s restroom. My heartbeat climbed to my ears, faster each second. I felt the world slowing its turn. The airport crowd disappeared from my view. For what felt like an hour, I waited.

When the officer finally stepped out, he was followed by another man.

“That’s my bag.” The words stumbled out of me before I could process the scene, more reaction than conscious effort.

The man in black from the bathroom did not speak. The officer, uniform still imposing its nebulous authority, spoke for him.

“This bag,” he countered, gesturing to my purse, “belongs to the professor right here.”

I was incredulous. Clearly the briefcase belonged to the silent man, the black fabric matching his title and appearance much more than the feminine cut and warm orange-brown of my purse.

“It’s my bag,” I insisted, “open it. You’ll find my ID in my wallet, my passport, and inside it my social security card. I can tell you the numbers. There’s a book in there too. It’s huge, you can’t miss it; it’s Rhythm of War.”

Without opening the bag to confirm, the officer held my purse above my reach, and repeated simply that it in fact belonged to the professor standing in front of him and not to me.

I pleaded with the officer to open the bag, I begged him to confirm its contents, or at least to spot the gigantic book inside. Still, he refused. Still, the towering and impervious uniformed figure taunted me by holding my bag inaccessibly beyond my reach. Still, he ignored me and directed his attention to the professor in front of him. Who was I, foreign-looking and alone, contradicting authority without an ID or proof of identity?

But the officer slipped up. Rapt in conversation with the purported professor, he eventually lowered his arm just enough for me to snatch the purse from him, just enough for me to slide the zipper open, just enough for me to spot the huge book with its purple cover.

The scene shifted around me. Overtaken by anger, frustration, and fear, I was on top of the officer, pinning him with my body weight sat above his chest as I slammed the book repeatedly onto his head. He didn’t defend himself. He didn’t move. “I could kill him like this,” I realized, though my muscles did not let up the beat of the hardcover novel against his skull.

“No one deserves to die.”

“If anyone deserves to die, it’s you.”

Simultaneous thoughts like mirrored twins, my arms froze mid-swing.

Again the scene fuzzed and transformed. Comically inflamed, like a cartoon victim of a swarm of bees, the officer raged, holding my body limp by the neck out a skyscraper window as he shook me, repeating to me my own mantra over and over,

“If anyone deserves to die, it’s you.”