REFLECTION: Today, the 21st, I worked for about a solid 5 hours straight on this draft of my short story "Connection to Greenville" the day before I worked on developing a bacteria speculative evolution piece which I didn't have time to work on today. Connection To Greenville.

I was waiting in the Atlanta Airport for a connecting flight to Greenville. My girlfriend’s mom, Susan, got off the plane with me. Her friend, Gilbert, flew in just around the same time we had. He’s lurch-like, hunched over, and tall. Almost as tall as me. He has deep-set eyes with two deep folds, weirdly thick hair on top, and weirdly thin hair on the sides. With the recessed crater indents that people have in their skin from growing up having cystic acne, and an issue with keeping their hands away from their own face. Gilbert was the son of the British-Saudi ambassador who served during the Gulf War, and for some time after. He looked maybe a bad-forty or an ok-fifty years old. I don’t know all that much about the Gulf War. I’m sure if I asked Gilbert, he would have plenty to tell me that other people wouldn’t.I don’t know if he’d let loose though. I would have wanted to ask him. He would have been pretty young during that time anyway.

I know a little bit about Saudi. I used to do Tarot readings for this schizoid Saudi-Arabian guy to fund my gambling addiction during college. I’d figured out that if I had infinite money and kept doubling my bet on the same color in roulette, then I would always end up winning. I had some math to back it up, but I also didn’t have infinite money. I’d always tell him what I thought a therapist would say, peering over at him from one of those large midcentury modern sorts of chairs. Then wedge it through a tarot-reader filter, like playdough through chickenwire, until I could tell him whatever I was thinking without him noticing I was a total quack.

Gilbert looked nothing like the schizoid arab guy who used to pay for my Hard Rock visits. I had an image of what he seemed like from my girlfriend, who’d said he was pretty normal. Most people are normal enough, so I’m not sure that’s untrue, but it didn’t seem true even upon first impression.

When I got to the airport, I landed down in the international terminal with Susan, and got off the plane. We came into this hallway of mirrors-style exhibition, with stylized blocks of culture and color painted on either side. Atlanta’s airport has an adoration with the African American diaspora in how it’s decorated and how it behaves. It moves people in mass from one place to another, and makes itself extreme with the noise of babies crying, planes taking off, and occasional complete silence. If you’re forced to be in it for any long period of time, it feels like it hurts to exist. Atlanta airport seems to be the biggest hub for people in Atlanta who don’t want to be in Atlanta and are waiting to be anywhere else.

Susan and I shuffled down for just a few feet. Then there would be a raised moving pathway to push us along a little faster, then we’d get off, and another few feet, and we’d be pushed along again. Past what must be every painting ever to come out of Atlanta, with photos of famous people who knew Atlanta well, and probably wanted to be there when they were alive. Depictions of violence in Atlanta, scenes where people were dancing and loud, and scenes where they were silent and loved pass by. I don’t think anyone notices.

Susan and I had talked about plans on the plane for a little bit before she fell asleep. I kinda knew I was supposed to meet this guy, but not really any of the details, so I’d asked her how she meet Gilbert and who he was, and she said.

“ He’s a good friend. He reminds me a bit of you.

We met in grad school. I was studying marketing analytics. Not because I really wanted to, Modus, the company I was working for at the time, told me they could pay for it, and I couldn’t afford anything like that myself. Gilbert had just moved from Saudi Arabia to Florida for the first time.

I’d hang around after class, even though everyone seemed to pack up their backpacks and go home the second they started thinking they’d learned something. I didn’t have time to stay long enough for clubs or office hours. It was a commuter school. I was older than most of the other students. Even though, looking back now, I probably wasn’t all that much older. I just had a kid. I’d walk around a little bit every day, and I’d see some of the same faces, but everyone always seemed to be in a rush.

I took an anthropology class. Just because it was required.

swear to God though, it was taught by this old, short, blind man with white hair sticking way out on either side. He looked like an albino Albert Einstein, and he’d get on his bike and ride it down the closed-off brick road all the way down to the bay. His red-ended cane would hang right off the side like it was gonna fall off any second, and he rode like he couldn’t run anyone over. Then he’d get in his car and start driving.”

Susan started gesturing wildly back and forth with her eyes closed, and an invisible blind man’s cane in her hand. She did it wild enough that I was scared she might hit the Japanese couple standing in front of us, and I’d have to speak to them for her. They turned back and stared, and pulled their rolling luggage in just a bit closer. I felt my nerves go numb and my face feel hot. I must have been obvious, because Susan opened her eyes, looked down smiling, and got all quiet for a second. So I let out a little hah-sigh laugh, so she’d be able to continue. People from the Japanese family in front of us continued to look back occasionally. They were probably not from Osaka. People in Osaka act just like Americans, really. “I’d walk down the closed-off brick road every day after class. I think it was maybe morbid curiosity to see if my professor could see far enough into the future to stop his bike, or if he would let himself run someone over. I was going down the path, and he passed by Gilbert. Gilbert whipped his head around and looked back at him. Then fell over a loose brick out in front of him. Sprained his ankle. I had to take him to the hospital even though he told me not to bother with it. Then we continued talking. Went to dinner a few times together. You know how it goes.”

“What happened after that?”

“He had to move to Greenville after college. It was 2009, job market wasn’t great, and he got a job in Greenville. Sometimes I’d visit him when I would drop Lauren off at her dad’s in Greenville. To be all honest. I don’t know if he has made roots there. I heard from him a few years ago, and he was in Seattle, then he went back to Saudi for a few years, and came back. Now he’s back in Greenville. We only talk sometimes. When he calls.”

We headed up the escalator to Terminal D, and the overhangs had murals with chains, peaches, and flowers.

“I really thought since you were both going to Greenville, it might be good to hook you two up. I know you don’t have any friends there yet, and I can’t really follow you any further than here.”

“Sounds right.”

Susan and I headed along to the Delta lounge. She used her guest pass to let me in, sat me down next to Gilbert, and left to go catch her flight back to Fort Lauderdale. I was coming back from Japan. I was doing a marketing job for Mitsubishi down in Nagasaki. Initially, I had an internship, but I stayed a bit longer for work. Then a bit longer after that. I was really only coming back because of Lauren, she got out of graduate school in May that year. Lauren told me she was tired of having to pack up her things to get on the fourteen-hour flights there and the twelve-hour flights back.

I’d tried to convince her to come live with me in Nagasaki. I guess it didn’t work. She said she wouldn’t like it because she didn’t understand the language. I tried to tell her the language wasn’t the hard part, and she didn’t believe me. It’s not so hard to learn how to say a few sentences. She wouldn’t have to work with how much I was making. She also told me that she hated that I wasn’t able to call her every night because of the work hours. She’d tell me that a lot when we would call, which made it hard to pick up the phone. That’s how everyone works, so I don’t know why she had such a huge problem with that. It fine though, my living there wasn’t meant to be a permanent arrangement anyway. It was just something to fill time.

Gilbert and I were together, sitting in the Delta lounge of Terminal D on a set of off-brown armchairs. I remember vaguely staring at some tiny plates with little ritz crackers and lunch meat with some kind of potato salad. I’d poured a mound of tabasco sauce of the side of mine. I felt my body jolt awake while pouring it, when it was already covering half the plate. We were perched up pigeon-like by the window. Just above the road where all the transport vehicles took baggage from the other terminals to Terminal A for people actually going to Atlanta. My chair was smaller than I’d like, but not as tight as the plane. I don’t know when, but since working in Nagasaki, my shoulders had gotten large enough to bother people on planes. My sides too, but I do not really like to think about that. Every American told me that I would lose weight in Japan.

Maybe I am lucky to have short legs, and a larger torso. It makes it a little less uncomfortable than if I were tall and proportioned normally. If I had longer legs, it might be uncomfortable enough that I would boil up enough, and start purposefully pressing them into the seat in front of me to wake people up. That way they’d know it bothered me having to sit down for fourteen hours just to fly back to Greenville. They are maybe lucky I only have to hold my arms in, and grab my shoulders with each hand. I only looked slightly less like a boy than I had five years ago when I came to Nagasaki. I could see from my reflection in the window that I didn’t look entirely like my father yet, either. I’ve gotten just a bit wider in the face. Everyone said I would look just like my father. I’d hoped they weren’t right. Looking in the reflection, they might be. Maybe I’ll really look like him when I’m thirty, which isn’t too far off now.

Lack of sleep caught me, and what pulled me back now is that I remember there were these prissy, annoying motherfuckers sitting behind me. “Oh, you just won’t believe I had a wonderful time in Palm Springs. I just love the nature out there. It was a lovely trip. Where were y’all coming from?” “Well, my hubby and I went to Asheville, and then went up from there to go see my daughter-in-law in Virginia. Now she has a wonderful little boy she's taking care of. I wish he were mine, you know. We went to this spa place there, which I didn’t know about, it was beautiful, a real small hole in the wall kind of place you wouldn’t notice at first, and the girls and I, you know, we had just enough time for ourselves to feel refreshed before coming back down.”

“You know, Asheville is charming, but I wonder how they are doing after all that stuff with the hurricane and whatnot. My sister’s boy ran off there, and he doesn’t even talk to the family anymore. I think the only woman he ever loved was his mother. I guess I was wrong, seeing how he left to go live out there.” “Oh, it’s fine with the hurricane stuff, you’d barely even notice. I know lots of certain kinds of boys who go off there, so I’m sure he’s fine. You wouldn’t even notice the kinds of people living there. Real artsy sorts.”

I would look around if I didn’t already get a feel of who exactly was sitting behind me. I know the one yapping about her “hubby” turned to her boring man, and smiled. Then he looked through her and thought to himself, “She must be the stupidest idiot on earth.” I would bet money that at this point, he always looks at her as if he has no clue why they got married thirty-some odd years ago. If he had a choice, he would do jujitsu with her three times a week, and she’d be the punching bag, and, if we were any less vain and pathetic, they’d get a divorce and even remarry.

They continued the typical dialogue.

“I was traveling to France, maybe ten years ago, and you know, I didn’t want to do all the touristy sorts of things, I really wanted to experience the culture there.”

“I always try to experience the real local culture wherever I go. I remember when we went to the Louvre. Everyone was so enraptured by the monalisa that they couldn’t even see the rest of the Louvre,” she said Louvre with that H sound frenchie Rs have and added a uh to the end.

“No, I mean like the real culture. Like truly getting around and eating where the locals eat, and doing what the locals do. Not just going places everyone knows.” “Well, I was really trying to get in tune with the language, and I was talking with everyone around. The Louvre was just a starting spot for finding the good local spots.” I always hate this sentimental talk when I hear it. Why not go to the Louvre, put a lock on some big metal fence somewhere, kiss my girl, and have a baguette walking around the city with a big raspberry beret like it’s forty years ago, and I’m gay. Everyone already knows you’re a foreigner.

No matter where I go, I am always a foreigner. No matter how much I learn. How closely I pay attention to verbs, vowels, sounds, and syntax. I’ll never get it. Even if I wanted to, If I had kids in Japan, started living there. I’d accidentally send them to school with the kind of school backpack I’d carried around, instead of a Randoseru backpack like everyone else. It’ll truly be about the socks, hair, and chairs. I’d send them off to be bullied for something entirely out of their control. As if them looking the way they would look wouldn’t already be enough.

When I walk into stores to pick up a Pocari Sweat and go back home, on quick errands, they will ask me where I’m from, and when I tell them, they nod in agreement. Yes, sir, I am a foreigner. Yes, you were correct. If it isn’t obvious, I am not supposed to be here in Nagasaki. I’m supposed to be in Tokyo, or Osaka, or Kyoto. They have Americans.

I could be not even 10 minutes out of Greenville, and still be a foreigner. My English has suffered. I can barely get the words to feel right in my mouth. I wasn’t really even there that long.

Lauren and I grew up in Greenville during the summers, and we’d go swim in the lake near my dad's house out in the country. Her dad knew mine, so we’d met when I was real young. She was the only girl I knew, so we dated, and it’s worked that way for a long while. Every year when the summer would pass, she’d go right home again to Fort Lauderdale, and I wouldn’t see her till the next summer. I could be sitting down by the side of that lake right now, and Lauren could be there with me, and I would be a complete foreigner to it all. All of it.

Looking back at Gilbert. I took out my notebook and a Uniball Zento ballpoint pen from my backpack. I’d started using that type of pen when I got to Nagasaki, and one of my professors had told me about how much he hated the noises of pens shaking and clacking. It’s the only pen I could find that didn’t make any annoying jittering noises from loose clips and springs. I wish I didn’t care about things like that, I’d save a lot of money.

“These people are annoying.” I wrote on the page and flipped it around for gilbert to see. He was pretending to read wikipedia articles on his phone.

“I know.” He laughed an open tooth silent laugh, just to say, look, I’m tired too, I agree.

He got up and left, and went to the bathroom for ten-fifteen-twenty minutes, and came back with two highball glasses. One of them was a rum and coke, which he handed to me. Could not tell you the other if I tried. At some point it started to feel like I only ever had drinks out of a highball glass. Highballs were pretty popular in nagasaki by far the most drunk drink there, and it became an inside joke for me. You can add the suffix -hai as in highball to anything, anything can be a highball, orangesoda-hai, hotdog-hai, now Gil-hai.

I took the frog-mouth coin pouch from my pocket, and tried to pay him back, and dug my finger across the back. I know I got every inch trying to find any kind of USD, I don’t have particularly thin hands. Then I realized that it really had been that long since I no longer had cash on me. “You don’t have to.”

I threw the coin pouch loosely into my front pocket. I had on true religion jeans because Atlanta loves their jeans, and I knew if I wore them hot older ladies in the airport would compliment me on them. Even if they didn’t really fit right at this point, and would be uncomfortable on the plane.

Our flight got delayed two hours for de-icing. Gilbert and I spent a good hour alone staring out the window at baggage cars, and sometimes out-of-place civilian trucks. I put my hand to the glass and it was cold as ice. If it wasn’t Atlanta I would have wished it would snow. Everyone behind me ended up heading out an hour after they had started talking to go to their flight. They looked exactly how I expected.

“Did you sleep on the plane?” Gilbert asked.

“No, not really.” I haven’t ever slept on a plane before, not the way other people sleep, out cold. I’ll drone in and out though.

“Me, neither. Never been able to sleep on planes.”

“I could have probably driven to Greenville by now, it’s not too far.”

“Do you want to.” Gilbert seemed to rise a little bit to grab his things.

“No, flight’s so short, that when we get on it, it will be take off and descent. Those are my favorite parts. I wouldn’t want to miss them.”

“I would have probably preferred to drive if it were an hour ago. Susan told me I’d enjoy taking you home.” Gilbert rolled his body back into his seat.

I stood up to get more crackers and cheese that they had out. I wished they had Beanie Weenies so it could be proper football food. I kind of just wish I had played football in high school, actually. I never liked to watch it. It’s a bit too late to start now. I always liked the Georgia Bulldogs. Even if I didn’t get to play, I could get behind watching a game and having Beanie Weenies and cheese.

When I got back, Gilbert was holding a five yen coin from my coin pouch. It fell out of my pocket when I got up. He slid it back onto the table and took the coin between his pointer and thumb.

“When I was a kid in Riyadh, we used to have little coins like that, thin enough that we would drill holes into them. You could do it with a knife. We’d put them on a string and go try to hit another kid’s coin on the ground with ours from as far as we could,” Gilbert whispered this out like it was a secret. Then he flipped the coin around and put it on the table.

“Sounds like something you would do in a desert.”

“There wasn’t much to do.”

“Did you like living in Riyadh?”

“My father liked it. I don’t think my sister Dierdre liked it. She was a bit older than me when we moved to Riyadh. maybe I didn’t understand as much as her, but I thought it was beautiful.”

I nodded, and I slid my coin pouch off the table, and this time stuffed it down into my backpack in the same pocket as my passport. I went to the bathroom for about fifteen minutes, pretended to poop, and came back. I was shaking my leg and staring at the ceiling lights until I got the blue-blind spots, and couldn’t see the lights anymore.

My legs started to feel like they were pooling blood. Cause how long had I been sitting at that point, maybe twenty hours. To cut down time, I started pushing my laptop back and forth in my bag, pretending to reorganize. I found a set of shoelaces at the very bottom, with maybe some crushed-up peanut M&Ms. I pulled them out and held them, and two five yen coins in my hand “Are these long enough to play the game you were talking about?”

“It’s a bit short for me, but I can teach you to play anyway if you want to.”

Gilbert took the laces from my hands, pulled them through the coin, and tied a knot around them with the string using his teeth to pull it tight. Then I did the same, and he let his droop down onto the floor, like a dog on a loose leash. I threw mine at the very end of the string, at his, and it landed about an inch away. Then, I tried two more times. I did not hit the coin, but when I let mine hang to the ground, when he tried, he hit mine immediately right over to where you could see the flooring through the holes.

“I can’t get it.”

“I have a bit more practice than you do. It’s not too bad, is it?”

“I must be tired. I can’t even play kids’ games.”

I landed the coin just about on his and then pulled it back to lay there.

“It was probably easier to learn when I was ten.”

He threw the coin again, hit just on top of mine.

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This is my concept draft for my bacteria, and it is based on toxoplasmosis infection but it causes an enjoyment of smelling gasoline this species will be moved to the genus Alcanovorax due to new information I've gathered about bacteria and oil spills and things.