1 Armand Attempts to Leave an Airport

July 15th - One month until the convention

I think it was Douglas Adams who once wrote something along the lines of how it was no coincidence that not a single language on earth had produced the saying "as pretty as an airport."

This is because an airport is a bloody miserable place to be, no matter what language you speak or whatever your culture's concept of pretty entails. Airports are designed to suck the life force right out through the pores of your skin and use it to fuel the neon and fluorescents, not to say the automatons known as airline employees.

The flight from Heathrow to New York had been downright awful, but somehow the flight from New York to LAX had been just as ambitiously unpleasant. The plane was smaller, which meant the turbulence had been worse, as had the food, the service, and the quality of people. The middle-aged man sitting next to me, whose muscular bulk all but obscured the aisle beyond, appeared to have eaten something pickled prior to boarding, which had turned on him, and he'd shared his misfortune with the rest of the passengers in a variety of ways. I had tried to disappear into my corner, staring out the window, then had remembered in the nick of time my lack of fondness for heights and small spaces.

But that business had been over and done with for some time now, and I was once more standing on solid ground. Armand Demetrio, intrepid cartoonist stepping boldly into the land of the free and home of the brave.

That was, of course, assuming I'd clear customs.

After explaining to the severe, steel-jawed men in uniform that despite my complexion and accent I was not, in fact, a terrorist, but, as previously mentioned, an intrepid cartoonist, I was unceremoniously tossed back into the passenger hall, having been searched, interrogated, and implicitly admonished for not having the decency to be a god-honest terrorist. I could only imagine that the good bruising of a man's dignity was a cherished and prestigious art form in this country.

Eventually, I managed to locate the carousel which (so promised an assortment of lighted dots) would soon furnish me with my luggage. I found a place to stand, maneuvered my muscles into an autopilot arrangement designed to instantly wake me if and when I began to tip over, but otherwise was left free to lose a degree of consciousness.

I was quite happy to hold this position for as long as it would take for my luggage to appear, but I soon became aware of some sort of ... humming nearby. Far from an electronic or mechanical hum, this was the sound of a happily atonal Homo sapien unintentionally sharing their self-satisfaction with the rest of the world.

I couldn't help myself; I glanced over.

He was a radiant specimen of as-seen-on-TV America: the delicately sun-bleached hair, the taut and lightly flushed skin over a sharp jaw and respectable cheekbones, straight nose, perfectly white teeth, and eyes that were so full of joy they might as well have been shooting laser beams of glee.

He was texting, shoulders hunched and chin buried in the folds of an expensive-looking scarf; he grinned down at the phone as if it held all the wonders of the universe and had promised to share. His thumbs fluttered rhythmically. He then waited a moment, giggled to himself upon receiving a reply, and once again clickity-clacked and beepity-booped away as he all but wriggled with the pleasure of communication with some other, obviously beloved, entity.

At one point, while presumably awaiting a reply, he glanced over and flashed a blindingly joyful grin in my direction. "Morning!" he chirped.

Unprepared as I was to be addressed by such a young American Adonis in my present condition, I managed a grunt and a bit of a half shrug. He did not seem to mind or even process this response and turned back to his bliss-giving sliver of shiny machinery.

That seemed like it was going to be the extent of our interaction, but a few moments later he stepped forward to pull a powder blue case off the carousel, turned to me again, and said, "Have a great day!" With that, he floated toward the exits, all but dancing along and whistling as his body language proclaimed in thundering overtones: I am young, I am in love. The world runs deeper than its crust and its filling is a sugary goodness of affection and mutual respect. Watch me take a big bite.

I watched him as the happy squeak of his trolley wheels propelled him through the lobby and out into the world, where he would undoubtedly go on to live a charmed and cherry-flavored life, and I would never lay eyes on him again.

An eternity of ten minutes later, with my luggage safe and finally in hand, I bade a relieved farewell to the carousel and turned toward the arrivals hall. I vaguely remembered that I was to be met or collected by someone from the university, so I made the effort and raised my head a little, just enough to take in the crowd waiting at the edge of the hall. Then I froze, riveted to the spot in disbelief.

My name, written in sparkly gelled ink and surrounded by stickers and stars, was on a piece of cardboard. This was held in a delicate right hand, the counterpart of which was holding and waving a tiny honest-to-god Union Jack.

I blinked, but it was still there.

A slight body, by all appearances connected to the hands that held the sign and the flag, wiggled and shoved its way through the crowd, and turned out to be topped by a grinning ginger head replete with freckles and gleaming green eyes.

"Armand!" it squeaked as it pushed toward me. "Mr. Demetrio, I'm Robin Finch!" It was strange to hear an American accent emanating from such an uncannily Irish face.

He managed to extract himself from the crowd and stood, bent double for a second, catching his breath. Swallowing my dread, I took the opportunity to search the crowd for the chaperone I hoped would be there.

This was a child; perhaps his chronological age would contest that, but it was a fact nonetheless. Anyone who believed gel pens and stickers to be a valid form of communication should not have been allowed out sans their name and address pinned to their coat lapel.

Robin Finch, Boy Wonder, had apparently regained his wind and composure, seeing as he was now both walking and babbling. Once it became clear that the noises emitted by him were intended to convey information, I took care to listen for a few moments, was reaffirmed in my assumption that it wasn't worth the effort, and tuned him out again. I nodded a few times and even grunted once but, most importantly, followed him out of the airport and into the car lot.

Well, I say "out of the airport," but the car lot was, of course, part of the airport. This might seem a mite nitpicky to some, but as anyone who has ever attempted to leave an airport knows, the car lot is naught but a false hope—you think it means you're almost out, but the truth is that there are long tunnels, endless spiral ramps, and incomprehensible, asinine road directions still ahead. In fact, you will not have left the airport until you have returned all the liquids in your possession to their natural state within bottles and tubes larger than the miniscule amount allotted to air travelers. Or perhaps, the official moment is when you see a small shop and do not instinctively want to burn it to the ground.

Robin Finch had led me to what was definitely a car of some sort, though arguments to the contrary were probably a regular occurrence. It was a yellow, old-fashioned Volkswagen, rusted and scratched but also polished to within an inch of its life, and it looked more like a child's toy than a vehicle. Robin patted her bonnet fondly before tossing my luggage in the boot and opening the passenger-side door for me. "This is Camille," he said proprietarily.

Hunching myself as much as possible, I managed to cram myself into "Camille." The driver's side was not only placed in a disorienting manner on the left but also disturbingly flush with the steering wheel and piled high with no less than three cushions.

I was going to die in a tiny yellow car in America.

Robin bustled into the driver's seat, still prattling as he shifted the car into gear. I waited for a rare pause in the torrent of blather, then said, "Camille? The Greta Garbo movie?"

Robin beamed at me. "You are an artist, aren't you?" he squeaked happily.

I tried to smile and managed a grimace as he administered a punch of camaraderie to my arm.

"I'm going to be an actor," he informed me. "I love comics and storytelling and that's why I'm excited about your workshop and all, but I really think I'm destined for the stage, you know? I'm actually the lead in this season's production. There's so much more complexity in theater, you know? It's so physically and mentally engaging, so I feel like I can really—"

I gently tuned him out again and tried in vain to see if I could spot the thoroughfare or any other indication of the real world past the cement spaghetti which was the airport parking complex.

I did not care to listen to Robin, and I did not care to think about the workshop I would be teaching. Norsemen University had hired me to teach a month-long summer workshop on ... well, the proper name of it was along the lines of "Deconstructionist Themes as Expressed in Use of Monochrome and Non-Linear Narrative." My agent, Lakshmi Ranjit, had likely come up with that name; what I would actually be teaching these young people, if anyone showed up, could be summed up as, "How to Draw Broody Fucking Comics."

Lakshmi had been forced to practically knock me unconscious to get me onto the plane. And yet here I was, in a tiny yellow car in America, being told I was an artist and expected to actually teach others whatever it was they thought I could do.

The car puttered to a stop at some sort of toll booth, and then merged onto the thoroughfare.

Despite my obvious impending death, I closed my eyes and leaned back against the threadbare headrest, as we finally, officially, truly left the airport.