Who They Weren't (II)

He was sitting near the window at a concourse in an airport he’d never visited before, sketch pad opened on a knee, pen at attention over a clean sheet of paper. This his traveling habit—to wait for an interesting face to present from a crowd. It was four days before Christmas so there were too many to choose from. Standing in line at a nearby gate, fooling with their phones; sitting with luggage at their feet, jackets folded across their laps. If he lifted a camera to his eye, he’d become instantly suspect. The interesting and uninteresting faces alike would turn away, or worse, would stare back inquiringly or as a challenge. But who would sketch from life in such a place? Quick glance up, look down, sketch. Quick glance up again, down, sketch. Speed and fluidity of action a premium, because the faces lasted only so long before they switched out of profile or vanished altogether. 
This one he was summoning through his nervous system currently, a guy with backwards baseball cap and earbuds. He was looking at something across the way, towards gate agents behind a counter. The nearest in view attractive—maybe admiring the generous soft curves of her profile? The pen skittered, flowed, wide loping passes in and out of the main congregation of marks, until a miniature version of the man emerged from the white of the paper. Sight of him entering stereoscopically through the eyes, transmuted into electro-chemical pulses via retinal cells. These racing almost instantaneously towards the back of the skull, the occipital lobe, where the pulses are recombined into imagery, harvested for contextual relevance, then experienced as shapes and colors as well as conjectures towards an idea: here was a man of specific age and race, wearing a L.A. Kings ball cap, head bobbing slightly to beats broadcast by Bluetooth from his phone to his ears. When the man’s gate becomes active and his number is called, he’ll gather his carry-on and walk over to his appointed place in line. Soon after he’ll follow the line to show a ticket to a gate agent, before disappearing down a tunnel towards his plane. Never to be seen from again, forever past tense. Abstract for the rest of his life. 
Being an amateur at his trade, the sketch artist didn’t worry after perfection. Many of his attempts veered wide of the mark, barely resembled their counterparts. He brought the pad along to pass the time but also to keep his eye in training. He aspired to professionalism elsewhere, where it really didn’t apply, a craft that ran shy of evidence, except when he later pointed little details out to others, what he’d noticed, aspects of the commonplace and obvious that many lived through but most others missed. He was a watcher by nature, having learned that memories were often formed and gained definition through careful attention to settings and occasions that claimed him as a smaller feature of their design. Vanishing into a crowd while also watching it move around him, he caught unrepeatable moments in instant half-life of their decay. The couple near the corner, for example. Dying for sleep, he could tell, expressions hanging from their faces, the father rising to stand with baby in his arms, bouncing it to keep it calm, mother taking a seat after handing off the baby. She pulls her jacket over her head, blots out the sunlight, courts a minute or two of unconsciousness. In ten minutes she’ll pull the jacket away and stand, take the baby in arms so her husband can sit and try the same. 
The pen skips and weaves, the couple wakes on the page, exhaustion surfacing as a messy knit of lines obscuring their faces. This is the best he can do for them. They deserve better commemoration, but that’s the most his hand can offer. Ten minutes shared at a gate in an airport he may never visit again, no other proof they existed or he did either. 
His friend Marmalade, once after flipping through pages of another of his sketchbooks years ago, remarked upon their busy, rushed quality. Sloppy, awkward. His figures blitzed by mistakes. Inept in perspective and proportion. It was obvious he was self-taught because no self-respecting craftsperson would’ve offered over the book for perusal to someone who’d been academically trained, such as he. Having established his bona-fides by insult, Marm was then free to admit these little instances of people he’d snatched from his surroundings had “genuine energy” to them. The fearlessness of his flaw-making gave life to his people. As if he weren’t representing them as avatars of some lonely eye but re-enacting them as sparks of movement and human relation. 
Marm’s conclusion? The pen and sketchpad were decoys, there to distract people from noticing they were being doubled in some stranger’s mind, where they’d flare up for a brief moment immortalized. His real skill was in sculpting attention into fresh encounters with otherness. The drawings were lesser byproducts of that. That’s what made them so curious to look at: the briefest passages of a feeling move through you and you’d catch for a moment what it must be like to observe unremarkable people, places, things as if they mattered. 
His hand was waiting again. Five pens of differently graded tips rested in his jacket pocket. His attention was on the move, grazing, scanning the crowd for a keeper. While he searched for someone, the sketchbook folded into closing position on the seat next to him. Closing the book between active periods was a habit he’d developed out of necessity, after a bystander once had leaned over to study what he’d drawn. Looked up, looked down again at the drawing, spotted his just-finished subject live among the crowd in an airport restaurant in Philadelphia. Without comment the bystander walked over to the person captured in the drawing and informed him, while he’d been peacefully minding his own business drinking a beer a stranger across the way had been drawing him without permission.
He stayed put. Would the man approach him, demand to see the picture? Would he tear the page from its book, crumple it to toss in a trash bin or fold and pocket it as a trophy? Flattered or insulted? Insulted by the thievery, flattered he was deemed valuable enough to be stolen. Instead of all that the man shrugged and nodded his way, continued with his beer. 
Flights were being delayed and cancelled. Snow was falling heavily in Chicago, which disturbed the delicate balance of arrivals and departures elsewhere, in other cities, Cleveland included. He could feel it spread through the crowd around him, angst about possibly being grounded for the evening. Over there, the family sitting on their suitcases in the corner near Gate B-16, all other seats taken. Two boys, twins from the look of it, maybe nine years old, a teenager in combined age, play rock-paper-scissors, the loser of each round presenting a wrist belly-up for a hard two-fingered smack by the winner. The parents on either side of them, plainly stressed, the mom scrolling through her phone and father with head in his hands. The head frees itself from the hands, pauses, yawns, then a finger lifts to pick a crust from the corner of an eye. These? Tableaux of frustration and boredom, family stranded for the next five minutes at least so ready to become a portrait. No, he decides, leave them. They’ve had a bad enough afternoon already. 
The sketchpad and pen waited patiently for a reason. It could be he was done for the time  being. An hour, two hours drawing and he’d often notice a loss of interest from both, pad, pen, so he’d give them a break and wander the room from a sitting position. People arriving and leaving, as if they were interchangeable, which in spirit they were, but not literally. They were approximate versions of one another only if he wasn’t putting all of himself into looking, mind and eye, not just the latter. One day maybe there’d be the technology to sketch without use of hands, but just from imagining it, visualizing. Neural interlink by some means to some later progeny of iPad, animation in an instant, this middle-age beauty for example sitting next to her boyfriend or husband crossing her legs, one muscular calf over equally muscular thigh, knee atop another, feet in a dangle next to each other but hidden in sneakers. If observing could come to fruition as drawing without mediation of hands, that would not be a good thing for certain. Who wants copious evidence of their perversions, casually formulated and committed on the fly?
Marmalade would be first in line for that kind of technology. Prurience was his specialty, most of his photos and videos and multimedia mash-ups played in some blithe but hungry way with straight-up hardcore pornography. None of his subjects had anything to hide except the real people they were, given the blatant nudity forced on their bodies. It was supposedly subversive, undermined and questioned bourgeois values of decency and politeness, but to the watcher, second-rate sketcher of people, Marm’s interest in people didn’t seem to extend beyond what he might instruct them to do, mere materials with which he might construct or reenact a fantasy. 
There was a difference between drawing a nude and photographing one. The difference even more pronounced if the nudes were clothed and allowed to go on their way, reintegrated with the mundane round of leaving and going towards places. Marm would probably be useless here. There’d be no one for him to see. Order them to strip, the whole lot, then the crowd would become visible. He only wanted people to be visible in one specific way, for his cold arousal, how strange. Whereas, journeyman that he was, the watcher and sketcher in his seat, is fine with taking a crowd wherever it’ll take him. Doubtless he was a bore and a disappointment to his friend, and had no idea why he gave away his precious free time meeting him every month or so at his loft, coffee for an hour, catching up about whatever, then asking for a look at any new sketchbooks he might be working on.
His own flight had been cancelled, rescheduled for later that evening. So his phone told him, by automatic text message. He perused the room to see if anyone else was reading their phone and if so, how their faces changed. The family of four sitting on luggage, the woman with impressive legs. The young mother and father with baby. Mr. L.A. Kings. Christmas music could be heard beneath the bustle of newcomers and blats of announcements and updates through the intercom. At the other end of a delayed flight and within the depths of his phone, people who loved him were waiting for him to walk through a door and hug them. If the watcher in him needed to make them more real, he’d have to pull up photos of them saved in his phone. If the sketcher needed to free them from the phone, he’d need to open to a fresh page and take pen in hand and one by one translate them into nests of scribbles resembling faces shaped by some memory of him. No to that, let the watcher and sketcher keep to their current surroundings. They’re merely passengers, companions he pulls towards the forefront of a situation when he’s left with not much to do but wait. He doesn’t need them to reassure him that he’s loved or remembered. 
He wasn’t a religious guy, not even what he’d call spiritual, but there was an air of pilgrimage about most airports. Metaphor regularly, and on scheduled time, became literal when people filed onto planes and those planes sleepwalked along a tarmac before rushing down a runway to lift off and meld with the sky. Similarly souls landed in bulk shipments and were released down tunnels to emerge enfleshed as people young and old, dragging carryons behind them on rollers. He’d died, entered cloud-land, then hatched into rebirth dozens of times before, a hundred even. Impossible to count how many lives he’d gone through, a different person wherever he landed. Marm would call all this flaky, stupid. Marm was a stickler with his atheism. If metaphysics of any sort approached him even so much as metaphor, he’d bristle and kill the discussion, citing the usual brutal truths as evidence against daydreams. That wasn’t the point, he would say. It’s not what we think or feel, but what they do. See how nervous some of them are, waiting for their number to be called? See how disoriented and groggy the new arrivals look, stepping into the florescence of the concourse? Most are headed somewhere and are suffering myriad irritations to get there. Let’s ease up on the judgments and not add to their burden. 
It was near dinnertime, his head was restless for coffee. His phone told him his flight now wouldn’t leave until just past midnight, plenty of time for him to indulge his other airport habit, aimless walking. No one would be a watcher forever. Eventually they’d have to stand and shake off the stiffness in their legs, take a step then another. He slipped his sketchpad back into his satchel, worked his arms through his jacket until the jacket became part of him. Another disguise for the watcher he often was, a standing man, yet another traveller. Natural kin to any given crowd in any given airport moment. Invisible to the Marmalade who wasn’t here except by mental proxy, as he imagined him, their discussion weeks or months in the future when Marm visits his loft in the new year, sips coffee from a mug that’s been handed to him, this fresh sketchbook within reach on the table before him. Together they’d relive the people excerpted from the flow of time and animated as marks on a page. Marm would pause now and then over a figure and ask, where had he found them, when had he seen them? He would think backwards from airport to airport to airport, arrival to layover to departure, then catch a brief flare of recognition, the person sitting there, alive again, him from a distance sketching them, then tell. Marm would flip the page, on to the next one, but for a second he’d still be in watcher mode, mentally still sitting in the moment. Then the moment would dissolve and he’d be back in the chair across from Marm in Brooklyn, leaning forward to squint at a page Marm would hold open and turn for his identification and description. They were each unique but fundamentally the same in that they were mirages summoned from and sustained by pen and paper. Close the book and in that single gesture intimate lived history could be collapsed into an object. And so in that how different was a book from a nude? 
He had never wanted to hear the answer, so never asked his friend. He was confident he knew the difference, though somehow it remained important he never think of it, so could never formulate means of describing it. He kept himself amateur, his technique undeveloped, crude. There was nothing to improve upon, but people to gain and lose by sharing a room with them. This one, for example, that Marm hadn’t yet seen, but which he’d soon flip a page to encounter. One boy extending an arm wrist-up for another to smack, the other with two fingers, pointer and middle, raised and waiting. Fingers forever ready to strike, sustained for as long as Marm studies them, asks after the reason they’re lifted, hovering. When Marm moves on and the page turns, the brothers are given back to oblivion as a book, one that might not be opened again for ages. Paper rock scissors. On a shelf among others like it, they might hide for the rest of their lives or his, imperceptible and so laid bare, but exactly where he imagines them.