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The sweater made Hunter itch. It was wool. He didn't typically wear wool sweaters but Ammo gave it to him. She took it out of the closet and brought it to him for no reason. He hadn't asked for a sweater or even intimated that he was cold in any way. He just sat on the couch, played with the tool, and waited. He sneezed several times. "It's a religious war in this sense." He heard that on C-Span, as well as, "This nation was founded as a Christian experiment. The priests and ministers aren't our Congressmen, rulers, or the president."
He had the word "uninhibited" written on his right hand in purple ink. He wrote it to give to Ammo. He wanted to remember it, was afraid of forgetting it. So many words he thought of he forgot about just as easily, just as quickly. How many things had he once known but since forgotten? Words slipped through his hands, but sometimes, if he worked at it, they stayed around for a little while. This was where the tool came in handy; he could program in words whose definitions he'd sought, store them forever.
She laughed when he sneezed. "Take it off," she said. He didn't want to believe it was the sweater's fault. They were preparing to leave for a trip, two days on the road. Indiana. "Don't worry, we'll be back Friday," she had said on the phone when he was still in Boulder, preparing to come to Chicago. He did want to go with them but hated the going part. But wasn't the going part the good part, the part that was more fun? He liked spending time with Ammo, plus this was a good way to get to know her new boyfriend Michael a little better. Hunter already felt they were beginning to get close. Maybe Michael no longer felt like Hunter was secretly trying to sleep with Ammo. He was so insecure, Michael, about things, his relationship with her, even though they lived together and rarely disagreed. Shouldn't that have been a sign, a testament to her interest, or the unassailable nature of desire? Hunter always projected what he thought he'd feel in a situation to which he would be a party onto the situation to which he wasn't a party. This thing tonight was supposed to be a dinner party, a post-Christmas Christmas party. What was this year all about, he wondered, while the sweater made his sinuses tighten and his nasal passages fill. He was in the process of congesting, the process of being congested. He longed for a box of Sudafed. It seemed, no matter where he went, he had an allergy attack. It wasn't just because of sweaters. Why was it that every apartment he visited had a cat or a dog these days? He was deathly allergic. Well, not deathly, but it was something of a bitch somatically when he started to get clogged up. All the sneezing was embarrassing. It drew a type of attention to him that he didn't exactly want, overshadowed the joke, upstaged the punch line, drew the focus away from whatever else was going on, derailed the conversation. So maybe he should start carrying his own decongestant, have antihistamine on hand, like gum or cigarettes, ready to deploy if he found himself beset. But this was a sweater and he could as easily take it off as he put it on, so really what was the big deal.
This was the time of the year wherein people thought about making resolutions. Hunter, at least, was thinking about resolutions. He had to write more often. That was a given. He had had what he thought should have been the last conversation with someone about his work, the sort of discussion where the other person invariably asks, "Are you writing?" and Hunter, perhaps after trying to laugh, but instead producing a perfunctory giggle or series of umms, responds, "Well not much," or he'll think about the, what, two stories he wrote during the four months he was away in Colorado and say, "Well I was somewhat productive," and maybe dissatisfied with how that would stand, he'd think about trying to excuse things with the pat response, "It's hard to write when you have to deal with real world concerns." But the resolutions. He wanted to write more this year.
It's a simple formula, really. You sit down. You type things. Some of it may be good, most not so good, but it's not a question so much of what's good and what's not good as much as a question of how much are you really committed to this. It was sort of the issue Ammo raised when they had lunch together, soon after he returned. He lamented his circumstances and she remarked, "It's what you're there to do, after all." It made sense to Hunter. He was in Chicago for the holidays but he was living out there, in Boulder, to write. Not so much to brood and send out old stories, but to write new ones, hope that maybe after so much time things that he wrote would start to mean something to other people. Not that it always meant something to him, the things he wrote, but in a way it must have, at least some of the time. People didn't often get what he was talking about but maybe he had a problem articulating. Or maybe they just didn't get it.
Ammo spoke again. Hunter was in the bedroom trying to figure out what to do with the sweater. He looked in the closet, didn't see a hanger or anything, and thought maybe it didn't come from there. So he just decided to politely fold it, but maybe it wasn't a sweater you fold, he didn't own anything like this, and since Michael was fussy, he felt the need to panic. Instead, he just placed it on the bed and hoped one of the other two would take care of it and not make that big a deal out off the impropriety. Ammo didn't seem concerned when she approached it; she thought the whole thing was funny, that a sweater made him stuffed up.
"You're allergic to fashion," she said.
He laughed. "Style makes me sneeze."
Always in an apartment like this, an apartment that one of his friends lives in, he thought about the inevitable comparisons that could be made: his place was much smaller, much farther away. But for his purposes, his apartment was okay. He was a student still. Those with better spaces were people out in the world, whatever that meant, so he shouldn't feel outdone. But there was another part that his apartment didn't have, a disparity he was all too aware of, and that's the girlfriend living in it. Or, more correctly, not living in it. He didn't even have a girl he liked, one whom he could imagine living with. He was alone and that sucked, would depress him if he let it. He wasn't even that good at picking up chicks. Actually wondered where to put them the times he could pick them up. He hadn't had sex in a very long time and hadn't had sex with anyone good (see: cares about, respects, or even loves) in longer.
His memories have turned into cartoons.
He wondered if he'll ever have an apartment that has a girlfriend and have conversations about things that are banal but yet for some reason meaningful because you're sharing them with another. And would the other be someone beautiful, a living angel of some sort, a seraph, blonde and golden in a white tank top with hair that's been recently wet or recently dried, and the apartment would be airy and the floors wooden, stained richly, and windows would be large, views glorious, if even just of an El platform or of another apartment. Windows. Views. That would be okay.

In the car.
"Okay, no athletes."
"Only celebrities?"
"And politicians."
"Okay."
"You start."
"Don Johnson."
Now to Ammo: "John Ritter."
Hunter: "Rachael Leigh Cook." And then, "Do I get extra points for a three part name?"
Back to Michael. "No. Okay. C. Catherine Zeta Jones."
Ammo: "James Carville."
Hunter: "Charlotte Bronte."
Michael: "Who's that?"
Ammo: "The writer. Duh."
Hunter: "Is it my turn?"
Michael: "Yes."
"Okay. What letter?"
"B."
"Bin Laden," Hunter said.
Pause.
"Well, it's two words," Hunter whined in childish lilt.
Michael abruptly ended the game when he gasped softly, as though remembering something critical after the patient's been stitched up and wheeled into recovery. "We should get a hotel room tonight."
Ammo said, "No, we shouldn't. They invited us to stay."
"I don't like sleeping in strange places," Michael said. He grew fidgety and gripped the steering wheel loosely with one hand, drummed against the cold glass beside him with the other.
"Hotels are strange," Hunter said, but nobody responded.
"I just don't want us to look like a bunch of snobs," Ammo sighed.
"We wouldn't," Michael said gently, yet pleadingly. "It would be more comfortable for us. Think about that."
Then, the question Hunter had been dreading. It came from Ammo. "Hunter, what do you think?"

After dinner Michael still wanted to go get a hotel room. "I'm not sleeping here," he said. "It's too rustic," Hunter added, trying to be helpful. Michael acquiesced on the drive up, but soon after they arrived in Richmond, he redoubled his efforts. Ammo seemed like she couldn't bring herself to tell her old college roommate Verne that they didn't want to sleep on the dusty, cracked air mattresses and musty blankets that Verne's parents brought out for them, even though she felt the same way Michael did. Michael came up with a story he halfway deployed about how they called ahead, to a Best Western, and Hunter added, for verisimilitude, that they didn't leave a credit card, so they wouldn't get charged (in case the plan backfired) so they would still have the chance to look for some place else, to flee. But he was just acting symbolically. He didn't care where they slept, even though there were pets there. He didn't care about anything. He was pissed off there weren't any girls he could have become interested in that night. In the car on the drive he imagined sitting on a couch, regaling in the company of a young Indiana woman, pretty, smiling, who would make him want to drink more and think less and it would have all been so very. But that didn't happen. Ammo had Michael, Michael had Ammo, the old roommate had her old British boyfriend, though they didn't seem to care much for each other, merely worked around each other, and everyone had someone, the married couple, and the guys who came to dinner alone but talked of wives whom they would need to check-in with on tacky gold cell phones before it got too late. Why was Hunter, no matter where they went, no matter who else was around, alone? He didn't meet girls. He was always the single guy. The way he and Ammo and Michael went about, as this group of three, seemed comfortable, for the most part, but there was something unmistakably wanting about the whole thing. Probably the parts where they thought Hunter was looking at something else and snuck a kiss in reminded him. Hunter never failed to notice those displays but always pretended not to. Michael and Ammo liked each other a lot. Hunter had nobody to like a lot. He thought of the line in that Wallflowers song, there's got to be something better than in the middle. But being alone afforded him a certain degree of freedom, and he couldn't exactly dismiss its intrinsic value. He could pick up whomever he wanted, do whatever he might have wanted. That's where his singleness would have been a good thing, at parties like these, or the times they went to bars together. These would be the times he could, hypothetically, hook up with a random girl, engage in the sort of banter that was lively and rapid and full of surprise, they way people talked when they first knew each other and, no matter how badly they wished to recapture, could never replicate.

When Hunter returned to the airport he got stopped at security. The metal detectors in Chicago seemed so much more heavily sensitive than they'd been in Denver, in Miami. All these post-terrorism quote-unquote safety precautions just annoyed him. He wished for a terrorist to outsmart this seemingly highly thorough and sophisticated mode of operation: all the beeping, all the removing of things from pockets. He thought these procedures were superfluous, wished for a time when this stuff wasn't necessary, or thought to be necessary by paranoid in-charge types. When it was his turn to be demeaned, out came the cigarettes and the lighter, the wallet and the loose change and dollars, the tin of mints (he found it interesting they didn't bother looking inside of it) but he still kept going off. They'd already relegated him to the one-on-one search area, with the small woman in the thick, cheap blue jacket. Armed with the wand, she kept drawing invisible lines over his chest, legs, and arms. Again and again she asked him if anything was left. He feigned surprise each time the wand took issue with a pocket of his. He was wearing two coats, his peacoat and his suit jacket, the latter of which he couldn't fit into any of his bags but felt like he would, for some reason unknown to him, need at some point before he was next in Chicago, even though this was a highly unlikely possibility. Vitamins, more change came spiraling out. He forewent the sighing and the "I'm inconvenienced" posturing and almost felt slightly guilty and apologetic for wasting this woman's time but that didn't last long because that's what she was there for. These people wouldn't even know what to do with a terrorist if they found one. How would they even know they had one? It would be so easy to fashion a bomb out of plastic explosives concealed in a Discman. They could even try playing the CD and it would work but they wouldn't even think to do that. What was the point of all the x-raying? It wasn't like they would recognize a deviation in the normal circuitry patterns and press the panic button beneath the conveyor belt. At which point men in white jackets would emerge. At which point they would crack open the CD player, seize the hazardous components, and save the airport, the city, the planet, hundreds of people, thousands of people from their demise. But Hunter kept thinking, wouldn't all these people, the guards, the pilots, the passengers, the hot dog vendors, he, himself, wouldn't they all just evaporate eventually anyway? All this self-preservation, this denying and prolonging the inevitable, was just so juvenile, so poorly thought out, so selfish, so American. Manifest destiny to avoid destiny and draw out all the monotony. Why couldn't more people be terrorists? Why couldn't more people fly planes into buildings? While a terrible thought, we'd be spared all this melodramatic hand wringing and faux-earnest stoicism if a few more stepped up.
"I'm sorry, sir," the woman finally said. "We're going to have to check your boarding pass again. And your ID. And a major credit card, if you have one. Debit would be fine but we will have to run it through for $300. Oh, and I'm going to need to see your shoes."
This was it. He'd had it. He decided he was just going to leave. "I don't want to go anymore."
She looked at him like a small child who had just declined dessert. Or a trip to Disney World. Or the National Book Award. Like it would have been impossible for her to have heard what she thought she heard. "I'm sorry?"
"This is just ridiculous," he said. "I'm not leaving anymore."
And he tried to gather his things, scattered among and in several plastic containers of varying sizes, his laptop, his two coats, his keys, his bottles of vitamins. After he was done, he began to walk away.
Living in the airport wouldn't be the worst life he could have imagined, he thought to himself, as he rearranged his things in different pockets of his pants, jackets, and laptop case. He would have to call Boulder and tell the director he wouldn't be returning. No more teaching. No more living. He'd certainly lose his security deposit and would never be able to teach again in that city, this city, any city. He'd be blacklisted. Labeled a defector. He'd be remembered as an untrustworthy, itinerant graduate student, interchangeable with and indistinguishable from the rest. He wanted coffee. Now that he hadn't passed the security gates, he could still return to the outside without it being a hassle and smoke a cigarette.

Michael was jealous of Hunter but had no reason to be. The way Hunter wasn't an either-or, or an abeyance should have meant something to him. Hunter cared very much for Ammo. He liked her a lot, they'd been friends forever, but he didn't wish he were the one who could call himself her boyfriend. That he didn't want. Sure, at times he found her attractive, those times when she really seemed to get him. Earlier in their relationship, or late in their relationship, last summer, before Michael, he would have liked to sleep with her, or at least make out with her, but now no longer felt the desire, or diluted desire, as he once did. That and the fact that Michael was so in love, so worshipful, so solicitous, so protective, made him not want to try. He liked Michael too, wouldn't have wanted to hurt him, but in a way appreciated his ability to, at least as Michael might have perceived things, to enact great destruction on their fragile union. So his attempts to persuade (without persuading) Michael that his interest in Ammo was a purely platonic one were never so ardent that he might have even started to believe everything he proclaimed was true himself.
One time they when were drinking at a bar, Ammo excused herself to the bathroom. Hunter wasn't drunk. Michael and Ammo had gotten to the bar a long time before he finally showed up and they were drunk. Hunter had maybe two beers and a shot but a big dinner before that so it wasn't really hitting him. Maybe the fact that he kept thinking about how he hadn't read very much, not really even at all, this break, and how he had written even less kept him sober. It kept him aware of who he really was and how he couldn't be anyone else. Michael said something he didn't all the way hear about being really jealous of his and Ammo's friendship. Since it was too noisy in the bar and Hunter didn't hear or wasn't fully listening but picked up the gist, he just smiled, and said, "Well, I try."
Michael moved closer to Hunter so Hunter could pick up his words more clearly, but he still wasn't following. Maybe it was the way Michael gestured with his hands, his intent so unmitigated, so unabashed, like what he wanted to say was so important and heartfelt that anybody could easily empathize and he didn't care who knew.
"Sometimes I don't know what she's really thinking about me," he said now. "Sometimes I get the feeling that she cares about me. Other times I'm not so sure. But I know she cares so much about you."
"I'm a better friend than I am boyfriend," Hunter said, but then quickly wondered if Michael would take that to mean, if I were a better boyfriend, or if I gave a fuck, I'd be sleeping with Ammo, and you wouldn't be. It was important for Hunter to remind Michael that he, Hunter, was the one who steered her in the direction of Nerve. He was the one who encouraged her to online date, since it did so little good for him. He was the one who kept her from running off early on when she didn't know what she wanted to do. Now, six months later, it was Hunter who joked for them about their getting married, and how he wanted to officiate, and how he thought it was all a good idea, and how the engagement ring should be sapphire with diamonds surrounding it, how it shouldn't be just a simple diamond, how that was too easy to get wrong, like what happened with the ugly ring on Sex and the City.

He sat on the floor, back against an empty stretch of wall, somewhere between newspaper machines and the men's room. He began to get warm in his two coats. He thought more about what his life would be like if he never left the airport. They'd think he was up to something. For sure. People didn't just refuse to pass the security gate because they were tired of unloading objects from their pockets they should have known better than to bring. But it wasn't his fault. For one thing he would never modify his life simply on the basis of stupid shit this flustered government came up with in order to "respond to the crisis." Their weakness actually pleased him. He didn't vote for the chimpanzee. The others did. Actually, they didn't either, really; the Supreme Court did. But it was the others who should feel the brunt of their bad decisions now. He was apart from it all. He was going to live in the airport and take his meals at the hot dog stand and read his newspapers for free and maybe people would bring him coffee once in a while. You could live in the airport, couldn't you. Planes flew in and out all day and all night so it would appear to those newly arrived that he was just one of those sad fools who hadn't heeded the "come two hours ahead" entreaties or had missed a connecting plane because of the ineptitude of another airport's staff in another city, not this one, not Chicago, and so had to wait for things to right themselves. In these modern times, people were essentially abused at airports, on airplanes. This was not a consumer-oriented industry, not anymore. This now was a "we take your money, we treat you like shit, and you just smile and tolerate it" industry. The rental car people he dealt with three weeks ago were much nicer, didn't require him to empty his pockets, and even apologized for the tank not having any gas in it, and made up for that fact with unlimited mileage and the opportunity to return the car with an equally non-existent amount of fuel in it. He got none of this courtesy from the airport people. They didn't even offer him unlimited local calls from the payphones, a free lunch, or, hell, even a room with a table where he could properly rearrange his pockets. Right now he couldn't have even found his cigarettes without checking several places. He wanted to smoke but didn't want to move. He last smoked hours ago, when he sat outside the Starbucks, in a parking lot, in the rented car, Ammo on a coffee break, to say goodbye, but they didn't really say goodbye, they just smoked. They sat together, some talking, some silence, hugged, he drove away in the rental car, returned it, and it was gone.

When he left four months ago they were in his car, his real car, the car now sitting in Boulder, he hoped still sitting in Boulder, and they listened to the oldies station and "Right Down the Line" came on the radio and it was a completely serendipitous occurrence; nobody expected that song to come on. They'd listened to it all summer on a CD. Many times. Sometimes in rapid succession. Now it was the last time they'd hear it together. I just want to say that this is my way of telling you everything I could never say before. Ammo started crying before the track ended. Hunter wanted to cry but didn't, couldn't yet, wouldn't until he was about to drive away, his back seat weighted down with pans and pots and cutting boards and an alarm clock and other things he couldn't fit into boxes or had simply forgotten to think about packing until after he'd filled and sealed up all the boxes. Ammo cried again that night, before he left, and when she tried to compose herself, they both ended up laughing. This time she wasn't crying. You could tell, or you hoped you could tell, that this was hard for her, that she didn't want to let go, but maybe she'd gotten used to his not being around. She seemed to be thinking about her life. She'd have to get out eventually and he had to return the car and was relieved when she said, "I have to go back to work." He wanted to cry about leaving her because, in truth, she was one of the things he'd miss the most. Maybe if she had gotten glassy, sniffled a little, it would have triggered something within him. But she didn't. It was cold outside and they'd ordered talls (latte, him; mocha, her) so that nobody would have expected this goodbye to take very long. They'd finished the coffee. Nothing took very long. They'd hugged and talked about her and Mike's trip to Boulder, maybe, in February or March, maybe to do a little skiing and she was out of his car again, all a bluster. Talking, however insubstantially, about them coming to see Hunter was a way of making a long time from now seem like not so long from now. He'd gotten used to things, his new life, this life without, pretty quickly. When he returned to Chicago for this vacation three weeks ago, he felt lost. Chicago looked big; he'd lost perspective. He had to keep reminding himself that this was his city, that this is where he was from, that this was what he knew best, since there was so much evidence pointing at the fact that he was an outsider, a tourist, a man without a place. His mother's house smelled different at first, musty, dusty, but after a few days the smell had gone away, or maybe he'd grown used to it, and he wondered if the next time he came back if he would still smell it, be able to discern change somatically or if he'd be too clogged to register dissonance.

On the drive from Chicago to Boulder he passed through Iowa fairly quickly and spent a longer stretch of time driving through Nebraska. Sometimes when he doubted his Mapquest directions, he noticed farm towns, farmhouses, miles and miles of emptiness where the land would have been undoubtedly cheap, and imagined himself there, literally there. If an apartment existed, and he couldn't know for sure if any did, they would be affordable and he get a job at an oasis McDonalds with all the sixteen year olds. He had everything he could have needed, aside from any furniture that the movers held hostage. Kitchen equipment. Clothes for all seasons. Alarm clock. He'd miss the orientation in Boulder and would lose his security deposit on the apartment he mailed in and shock and confuse his family and friends. But it would all be okay because he wouldn't have to worry about getting lost anymore. He'd be where he needed to be, or at least where he was, and he'd be okay with that. He didn't end up getting off the highway, though. He managed to direct himself to Boulder, find his apartment, the one he'd rented over the phone, and set up his bathroom garbage can and his desk garbage can, which, since he had no desk yet, wouldn't for weeks, served as a kitchen garbage can, and his computers. He lay on the floor, on a blanket, and wondered if he could feel the elevation. His nose bled but not just then. It took a little longer for his body to catch on. To notice that something was different. To react to that fact.
"I think you should come back," the woman, now standing above him, said. "I think we can work this out. You still have time before your flight."
How did she know when his flight was? Could they have already gone in the back somewhere, reviewed the video, assessed his potential threat to national security on a seven point scale, deemed him a 3.2, or 5.8, run a credit check on him, found out he hadn't paid his Qwest this month, interviewed his sisters, Ammo, Michael, alerted WGN that there was a potential situation in the works and to start amassing stock footage, photos from proms, and run screen tests with eyewitnesses?
"I'm not going anymore," he said. He was aware of how unhinged he might both sound and appear to the unfocused ear and eye. "I'm staying here. You won't let me go."
"I won't let you go?" the woman asked sharply, as though personally taking offense to Hunter's iconoclastic ways. "How do I have anything to do with this?"
"You do. It's your fault. I tried to get past your security clearance and you just kept asking me to take more things out of my pockets. Haven't you any shame?" He lip-quivered and tremors coursed through his limbs, but his hands were cemented to the tiles, so she would have only picked up the lip stuff, if even that. And from this maybe she sensed his convoluted, though impossible to ignore, humanity.
"We're just trying to ensure the safety of all parties involved," she said. He wondered if she had found that particularly all-encompassing trite phrase at a security worker's convention last month and wrote it in a small notebook, to commit to memory later, to use, if questioned about the merits of their fascist and demoralizing practices. But of course they were never questioned, not before now, because people were so fucking stoic. So fucking patriotic. Who in his right mind would ever dare to question anything in the wake of such systemic, all-encompassing evil, such democracy-threatening behavior? Certainly no rational American. Nobody who pays taxes and waters his lawn, if he had a lawn to water. Nobody who holds the door open for women and drops a dollar into the cube at Starbucks, even when nobody was looking.
"That's not good enough for me. You want to have rules? Fine. Have your fucking rules. But leave me out of it. Next time I'm not flying cheap-ass ATA, I'll tell you that much–"
"It's not the airline's policy, sir," she clarified, still trying to reason with the babbling, spoiled five-year-old at her feet. "Though, the airline may choose, at its discretion, to randomly search the carry-on luggage and other personal items of passengers, including, but not limited to, purses, lunch bags, and laptop cases. A state-issued ID or major credit card, no debit cards, might be required, at the time of the random search."
"Maybe I'll take the train back. There has to be a train, right? And maybe I'll never come back to Chicago again. How would you like that?"
"It wouldn't bother me, sir. I have nothing to do with this. I am just a functionary. I am just a foot soldier. I have a badge that has my name and picture on it but it's not all there is to me. I have children, you know." Women with child always seem to invoke the "I'm a parent" defense to explain and justify any number of infelicities and ungraceful ways of behaving. Any number of acts that make others feel like shit and demeaned and small. I can do this because I'm a parent, and therefore charged with a higher responsibility, a more important purpose than you, you childless, unmarried blight. This is what they think. Most of the time.
After she helped him to his feet, he sat back down again. She must have been thinking, This is getting ridiculous. I'm supposed to be over there. Supposed to be working. Supposed to be protecting. But who protects Hunter? Not Hunter. He just sits. Does he need protecting? Maybe he doesn't. Maybe it's the same thing with his life as it is with this stupid airport security. Maybe it's just a façade, a placebo, something people know doesn't mean anything but seek some kind of solace in, some kind of comfort. Knowing that something doesn't mean what you think it does actually can be quite comforting because you have the choice whether to admit what you're doing or feeling is bullshit or not, you're no longer just moving blindly, unaware, humming. Don't people see the futility in their actions? How really precarious life is? It's the same skewed logic that allows a person to not mind smoking in his car as long as his seatbelt is fastened, or living in a crowded city whose empty space fog fills, never knowing anybody else, never loving unconditionally. We don't want to die all at once. But there's nothing wrong with, or at least nothing remotely aberrant about, doing it a little at a time.
The light in there was making his eyes squint. He couldn't see everything that he knew to be around him. He could sense movement, vibrations. He knew people moved past him but he couldn't tell for certain whether they looked at him or not. Whether they wondered what his problem was and silently mocked him. Whether they were too preoccupied with their sandwiches from Potbelly's to even notice him. Whether they were used to such ostentatious displays from having flown many times since Nine-Eleven. Did the terrorists know what sort of repercussions their stunts, excuse him, their acts of religiosity would have on him, two thousand miles away? Maybe he didn't get pummeled that day by a steel wall or buried under file cabinet and laser printer debris below Tower One but his life was about to change, all because of what they did, or all because of how the world decided to act in, what, defense? Retaliation? At this moment, Hunter was collaterally damaged. And nobody gave a shit.
"You have two choices," the woman said, but it didn't sound threatening. "You could either sit here forever or you could pick up the pieces and move on."
Sit here forever or move on. Sit here forever or–
"I don't know why I'm acting this way," Hunter admitted, unsure at that moment of why he and this strange polyester-clad woman had become such fast friends. He supposed she carried no-health insurance, so that they had that in common. He imagined what had led them to share approximately the same space at the same time, why their previously unrelated existences had chosen this minute to come together was because he was Hunter and lived and wrote and she was Security Lady and used to be out of work and watched a lot of TV but got bored and responded to a job in the Reader one day and a handshake and W4 later–bam!–she's serving and protecting. But why? "I don't usually get a choice of how I should feel," he told her.
"What you do isn't necessarily tied to how you feel," she said, demonstrating a canny and unexpected brand of Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul wisdom, which Hunter didn't entirely object to. "Don't you know that by now?"
"So you're saying that I could just stand up and walk away and get on my plane and it would be like none of this ever happened? So simple I forgot to think of it."
"Look," she said. She pointed at the security aisles filling with midday travelers, more people about to get pissed off, like Hunter did, or who might just pass through the gate without thinking it's such a big deal, unlike what Hunter did. "I'm going to go back up there. You come to me when you're ready. We'll start over."

Ammo always used to tell Hunter that he "missed his chance" with her. Retrospectively, he might have seen how this could have been possible, but never really bought it. They started out as friends. She started dating another friend, a boy named Zack, and the three of them, Hunter, Ammo, and Zack became friends. Dined together daily in the cafeteria. The couple ate identically, and often synchronously, sometimes sharing one salad. Hunter, on the other side of the long table that no one else but them seemed ever to sit at, ate burnt grilled cheese sandwiches, or dry cheeseburgers, or flaky chicken nuggets, or whatever they happened to impassively serve him that day. At times Ammo's relationship with Zack made him jealous. Other times it didn't. But where this chance she spoke of would have taken place he didn't know. So years pass by. Like ten of them. Ammo's had how many boyfriends since then? Maybe five? And what has Hunter had. Sure, he's dated, but nothing really ever sticking, or leaving an impression on him, on Ammo, quite the same way. Maybe it was about living in color. Ammo, she lived in color. Her life had modulation. It had waves. It breathed. Hunter's had some blips of life but had basically flat-lined but nobody had had the opportunity yet to disconnect the machinery, silence the hissing beep, allow his loved ones to make final arrangements. His life was on life-support? Was there a way out? Was living in the airport the only solution? Certainly it would provide a certain amusement, a certain drama that things, at present, seemed to lack. Maybe he'd be able to meet a woman this way. Maybe a girl, much like him but different, was currently protesting the changes in the normal airport blithely moving people from place to place protocol as he sat there. He would find this girl, late one night. He'd be wandering around the empty terminals, trying to trick the soda machines he'd come across into letting him fill his cup (he'd find a cup somewhere) with ice and diet 7-Up, and he'd find her. They would talk and like each other and he would always say how strange it was that he should meet such a nice girl, a girl with whom he could have so much fun and drama and life while he was staging a one-man political protest, an anti-war movement of sorts. He didn't much care for the warring. This could be a good segue into pacifist movement work. The chimpanzee wouldn't steal his heart yet. He still could tell the difference between right and wrong. And this girl would pick up on this. And she would want to make leaflets with him on a printing press they'd uncover in the old, abandoned terminal, the one across the street they'd still be able to access by way of secret underground tunnels, and they would give unsuspecting travelers these brochures, these pamphlets, these position papers they'd revise and rework on his iBook in the smoking lounge (they'd have to build a smoking lounge as well, but that could wait) and convince hundreds and then thousands of dim people that things currently taking place were wrong and not well thought out and really didn't have the people's interests at heart. Then at night, when they'd have run out of vitriol to fuel their rhetoric, they'd opt for just the comfort of their closeness, the respite made all the more soothing by their sharing of the space, the ideas, the battle. Wars were no fun waged alone. He needed a team. He needed people to act and shout on his behalf. He needed Al-Qaeda fighters. People willing to hold up the line at security, their pockets loaded with metallic item after item. Mini pencil sharpeners. Key chains with or without keys on them. Foil wrapped sandwiches and dinner leftovers. Gum wrappers. Coins, foreign and domestic. Toothbrushes, which, though containing no metal, some arbiters would find menacing potential weapons of mass destruction. Tubes of Crazy Glue for when they'd get unhinged. Retainers in orange boxes. Carrots with the green stuff still on the ends. Three-and-a-half inch floppy disks and then five-and-a-quarter inch ones, as some sort of homage to the past, to a gentler way of life, a time in the world when files only used up a certain number of kb. Bumper stickers. They'd wear jackets with lots of snaps and steel-toed Doc Martens.
This would be a revolution.
A revolution nobody was fighting.
A revolution nobody would fight.
No. It didn't matter who would or wouldn't join him, who wouldn't act for him. Who would or wouldn't care. This would be about not missing a chance. Chances he missed all the time. This wouldn't be one of them. He would change things, god damn it, he would.
But then it stopped. He was ready to go. He stood up and began walking toward the aisles. Still people waited to pass through, many getting poked at by wands, having to look guilty yet somewhat awestruck about what they discovered, as though turning out their pockets for the first time, since they should have known better.
He attempted to steer himself into the woman's lane, wanting to show her that he was trying things again, that he wasn't afraid, that he wasn't pissed off, or at least not so outwardly so, but he fucked up, his line began to turn away from her, and he quickly tried to decide how to get out and into the right line. Before he could do anything, a young girl began to wave at him.
This girl, red hair pulled back, maybe sixteen or seventeen, smiled and passed Hunter through, with a minimum of shit. On the other side, he shook his head and looked back, tried to discern why things could once be so convoluted but, without really anything changing, had become completely different.
He decided these security checkpoints were like getting involved. One person you happen upon, more or less randomly, tries to stop you, hassles you, wants to ask questions and look into your bags and pockets, wants something from you, maybe things you don't even have. Yet the next person you meet, equally as randomly, isn't like this at all. Despite your expectations, she just blithely accepts you, doesn't bother waving things at you, just trusts that you'll be okay, that the world will be okay, that things can exist with a minimum of humanely intervention.
He wanted things in his life away from the airport to be more like they were with this girl.
He hadn't even missed his plane.

"I'm glad you're back," Ammo said the next day when they spoke on the phone. "Did you hear what happened at Midway yesterday?"
"No, what happened?"
"Apparently some guy got detained. Something about concealed box cutters. They don't know what he was trying to do. I thought it was you. It was around four o'clock. He wouldn't make a statement to the police."
Hunter laughed. Talking to Ammo seemed to make all the more real the fact that he was back, that he wasn't in Chicago anymore. He hadn't reset his watch, was still functioning on Central time. He didn't want yet to return to Mountain even though he knew, at some point, he'd have to. "That does sound like something I would do."
"I thought since you're on this big airport-security-is-stupid kick."
"Well it is."
"That you'd–"
"I can't believe how sensitive their metal detectors are there. It wasn't that bad in Denver. I held my laptop up, not even standing under the thing and it started to go off. It's ridiculous."
"Don't be a terrorist, Hunter. You're too adorable. Even though it would give you a reason not to shave, and I know you're always looking for a reason not to shave, I just don' t think it's you."
"What's me?"
"What's you?" She sounded like she was looking at something, writing something, and just repeating hollowly what he said as some sort indication she was paying attention, which she really wasn't. She would, at some point to follow, ask him to repeat what he'd said. And he'd try to say it again, but the words would sound foreign to him and he wouldn't know what to say.
"What am I? What do I mean when I say 'I'? When you think of me whom, exactly, do you see?"
"I see you."
"So I'm not just a vapor. I exist. I take on a shape and I don't lose that shape."
"Hunter, I can see you in three dimensions. You are not undefined."
"You can?"
"Yes, I can."

That night inside his apartment in Boulder, it was quiet. Too quiet. Outside it was noisy. The wind blustered around, flipping the lids on the Dumpster, hoisting them up and clanging them back down again, as though it didn't want to be ignored. Tired of waiting its turn. As though it had a point to make and wanted somebody to listen. Now. Drunk, loud people walked around, shouting at each other, at nothing. Hunter couldn't sleep in his bed. It was too noisy and cold. Wind seeped in through a crack between the window and the wall. He moved onto the couch where he lay scrunched up under a wrinkled blanket like a broken arm. He couldn't sleep. He thought about having a conversation with the maintenance man about the window seal, how he would explain the problem with the crack, and wondered if the man would understand right away and fix everything with a caulking gun so Hunter could sleep without freezing or hearing people walk down the street all the time. Maybe that's all the explaining he'd have to do. He wanted it to be that simple. Somebody else could take over from where he left off, understand, and be able to fix things. It could be like that. Things could work like that. He hoped they could.
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