Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I don’t tell the driver to stop. I go on to the airport and check my bag and wait to go through security and blah-blah-blah—take out my laptop, remove my shoes, make sure to show the security guy my stupid boarding pass.
It’s the same everywhere.
Everywhere’s the same.
I wander along the faded carpet until I come to my gate. The plane to Atlanta, my connecting city, isn’t boarding for another twenty minutes or so. I go over to the magazine store and buy some flavored fruit drink thing, and then I head back—lying down right there on the ground next to the big, impossibly thick windows looking out onto the runway. I close my eyes and try to maybe sleep a little.
I’m not sure how much time passes.
I stay lying like that for a good long while.
Maybe I even fall asleep for a minute.
But then something jerks me awake very suddenly, and I open my eyes to see this girl staring straight down at me.
I sit up a little, trying to get some kind of read on her.
I’d guess she’s probably around my age, with black hair cut sort of jagged around her face and then hanging down long in back. She’s small, with sharp, angular features and blue crystal eyes that shine bright. She wears a simple black cotton dress cut short to reveal sun-browned legs and burned shoulders.
“Hey,” she says, laughing, her voice coming out reckless.
“Hey,” I answer back—sort of startled or confused or something.
She leans in closer, still smiling, her eyes shimmering under the fluorescent light overhead.
“I’m sorry,” she sort of giggles. “I don’t know why, but I just had to come talk to you.”
“Um,” I say, sitting up a little more. “That’s okay.”
There’s something very beautiful about her—pixieish—like she could vanish at any moment.
She drops down next to me, her legs pressed together, rocking back and forth, still giggling a little. She offers me a cashew.
I don’t take it.
There’s what feels like a very long silence before I think to offer her some of my fruit juice drink.
She laughs at that but then goes ahead and tries it, spilling some of the pink liquid on her wool sweater.
She says she doesn’t like it very much.
I can’t help but laugh along with her at that.
“So, uh, what’d you wanna talk to me about?” I ask, taking the bottle back from her and accidentally touching my hand against hers. The feel of her skin is very soft. A crackling of electricity surges through my head.
Her eyes stay focused on mine.
“I don’t know,” she says, not blinking or anything. “I felt like I had to. You’re a great communicator. You have this power in you that is like nothing I’ve ever seen. You’re going to do great things with your life. You’re going to help so many people.”
I laugh another laugh until I realize she’s being serious.
That Twilight Zone music plays in my head, and I start looking around, not really focusing on anything, suddenly thinking I better find a way outta this.
“Come on,” I tell her, smiling to try ’n’ make a joke out of it. “What are you talking about? You don’t even know me. I gotta say, you’re sounding a little crazy.”
She smiles big at that.
“Right? I know. It is totally crazy. But I just feel this, like, energy coming out of you. Are you an artist? Or, no, a writer. Isn’t that it?”
I swallow something down in my throat. “Yeah,” I say. “Well, I guess I am. Did you, uh, see me on TV or something?”
Her eyes just won’t let go of mine.
“No, wow, you’ve been on TV? That’s so cool. No I, uh, had a feeling I needed to come talk to you is all. What kind of stuff do you write?”
I can’t help but look away, even though all the tension in my body seems to have drained out all at once. It’s a feeling like giving in—like being wrapped in a thick comforter, finally letting sleep overtake me after years of restless wandering. I feel disarmed, wonderfully helpless. I tell her about my book and what’s been going on with me. It’s like the words just keep coming out before I can stop them. I know that’s a cliché or whatever, but really, I mean, that’s the way it is.
Anyway, when I’m done with my stupid monologue, I finally give her a chance to say something, and she goes on to tell me that she’s leaving on this sort of mission thing to Nicaragua with a bunch of kids from her school—a ministry program out of northern California. They’re going to pray over people there and shrink tumors and restore eyesight to the blind and hearing to the deaf and all that faith-healing bullshit. She’s gonna bring God to them. She says all this to me super casually—like it’s just assumed, or whatever.
And then she asks, you know, real simple-like, if she can pray over me.
I laugh.
It’s all so totally ridiculous.
I mean, I figure, why the hell not?
It can’t hurt.
Plus, she’s beautiful, like I said.
So I tell her, “Sure.”
Now, look, I’ve read stuff about the power of suggestion and mind control and whatever. After being involved in a very sort of extremist sect of a twelve-step program when I was younger, I’d become fascinated with the way desperate people are picked up by these groups, exploited and manipulated, and then tricked into having so-called religious experiences where they feel something they imagine to be God.
But, I mean, I don’t really believe in any of that shit—I
