When we are back on the highway, I roll down the window and toss my cell phone out. I watch it bounce on the asphalt and then disappear underneath the wheels of a Peterbilt semi behind us. Then I turn back around and face forward, not seeing the traffic or the airport or anything—it’s as if it has all been blotted out, the entire world, and all that is left is a blank, an emptiness. I know that blank space will be filled in soon, colored and peopled by reality. The idea frightens me. Sometimes that blank space is safer.

CHAPTER TWO

On the flight from San Antonio I sleep hard, dreaming about things I don’t remember, which is probably for the best. The only image that lingers is of dead flowers in a garden. By the time we land in Atlanta, I almost feel human.

When the plane is on the ground and taxiing to its gate, Caesar turns his phone on, and almost immediately it starts blowing up with alerts. He frowns at the screen.

“Frankie?” I ask.

Caesar shakes his head. “Your uncle. Wants me to meet him at the airport.”

I stare at him. “Did you tell him I was coming to Atlanta?”

“No. He sent this almost an hour ago.” He taps the screen and holds the phone to his ear for a few seconds, then lowers it and taps the screen again. “No answer.”

“Why would he want you to meet him at the airport?”

Caesar shrugs. “The man doesn’t always explain himself.”

“It’s me.” Ridiculously I feel myself sinking into my airplane seat, like a toddler refusing to get out of the car. “He knows I’m coming home and wants to talk to me, or get me to do something for him. Or lock me up for my own safety or some paternalistic bullshit.”

“Avuncular,” Caesar says, sliding his phone back into his pocket. “You mean avuncular bullshit. Means uncle-like.”

“I know what avuncular means. Where is he?”

“Probably at baggage claim, waiting for us.”

“Fantastic,” I mutter.

Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta is a series of long terminals connected by a train with a pleasant, female robotic voice announcing concourses. It’s what the near future must have looked like to folks back in the 1980s. Today that train feels like that old ride at Disney World, the Carousel of Progress—people like the idea of it, but the reality is a little embarrassing. It’s a shame, really. People get into winged metal tubes and are hurled into the stratosphere at around five hundred miles an hour and then land safely in another part of the world. For that fact alone, airports ought to be temples of wonder to the miracle of flight. Instead, they’re mazes to be navigated as quickly as possible so people can get to their cars and then sit in traffic jams on the interstate.