INTERSTITIAL SPACE
or; A Sentimental Journey

by James Lincoln Warren

Chapter 1. Hurry Up and Wait

The ball may be over, but Cinderella’s carriage hasn’t quite turned into a pumpkin. I’m sitting here in the waiting area of Gate D-23 at Thurgood Marshall Baltimore Washington International Airport waiting for the boarding call for the first leg homeward. Depots and airports are called terminals, because they represent the respective ends of routes for trains, buses, and airplanes. As far as human beings are concerned, however, they are anything but terminals. Far from being endpoints, they are the quintessential places between places, the middle flats of no-man’s lands, mundane limbos that represent neither punishment nor reward but only existence, palaces of passive stasis where normal life exists only in suspension.

I hate airports, but you probably figured that out.

A few hours ago I was having a drink with Rosemary Stevens, Steve Steinbock, and Dan Stashower in a hotel bar in our final act of Bouchercon communion. The metaphorical bell was tolling metaphorical midnight, beckoning us back to our normal lives. In a few hours, I will be home again.

Chapter 2. Wing Walking

Now I’m in the air on my way to another airport. The symbolic journey might be between the gate of imagination and the landing of experience, but the actual journey is from Baltimore to Los Angeles. This makes me wonder if there is a story-telling equivalent of the airport, a place where one’s heart idly waits while the brain’s engines are brought on line to lift one up and away.

Bouchercon can be intensely stimulating, especially for novices, but even grizzled veterans sometimes overextend themselves. Writers and readers normally abed at reasonable hours find themselves shutting down the bar several nights in a row. It’s not that they are imbibing immoderately, although many are—no, it’s the conversation that’s keeping them going, the joy of being with other True Believers and the draining fervency of sharing the Faith. One of the most frequently heard observations I heard this past week was, “I’m exhausted.” At least a dozen people said this to me at one time or another this week, and at all hours of the day. Two of them were the primary organizers, four of them were editors, and the rest writers and fans.

For some folks, it will have been too much. They will have shut down out of sheer self defense. They will enter an airport of the soul, waiting for the next flight out.

Chapter 3. Going Buggy

Dateline Atlanta.

I have a two-and-a-half hour lay over here, so the first thing I did was have dinner. Airport food is the worst in the world, fattening without being nourishing, like the tortured similes of overwritten sportscasters’ babble, always at its worst during football season. Taking it to the house. Taking care of business. Making a statement. Bacon cheeseburger and chili fries.

Pepto Bismol, please.

I deplaned just in time to see the Arizona Cardinals take down my Cowboys in overtime. The telecast was courtesy of the “CNN Airport Network”. Of course, CNN is based in Atlanta, so one wonders how wide the network spreads, but it’s everywhere you look here in Terminal (there’s that word again) D. (Same terminal, different airport? They didn’t have TV screens every fifty feet in Baltimore, though.)

I suppose the reason they pipe in video and news is to try to convince folks that they are not in limbo, that they are somehow still connected to reality instead of being sealed in a long steel cocoon like so many hibernating pupae.

Yes, I must admit, even here there’s no stopping metamorphosis. Airports only seem to exist out of the time stream, perhaps due to their numbing sameness. Let’s face it, amigos: American airports differ from each other less than Pizza Huts do.

Monotony may be the least interesting of crimes, but it, too, is fattening.

Chapter 4. The Last Leg—or is it Foot?

The flight attendants informed us it would take us four and a half hours to reach Los Angeles. As a result of crossing all four timezones, that puts me home at almost exactly midnight. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s exactly when Cinderella’s carriage did turn back into a pumpkin.

There’s only one more airport to endure: LAX the Infamous. But mercifully, the only thing I have to do there is collect my baggage (in a manner of speaking).

It has been said that all stories are in some sense journeys. I am nearing the end of this one, but another is about to begin.

Remember what I said about Bouchercon being stimulating? Of course you do. It’s only a couple inches above, although for me it’s been some hours since I mentioned same. But anyway, one of the main reasons I go to the Edgars and Bouchercon and other such entertainments is because they remind me why I write and why I write about what I write about. In short, they motivate me to carry on.

Now I’m going to confess that I’ve had a new Treviscoe story kicking in my head for months but despite many attempts have utterly failed to write it. This has been unbelievably frustrating.

And on this trip, for me, there has been a glass slipper. If this unwritten story can be compared to the exquisite and mysterious Cinders, and I assume the part (mais bien sûr) of the handsome Prince for my grand finale, let’s just say that while the unknown beauty may not yet be in my arms, I now know how to find the dainty foot that the slipper fits—something I could only have found at the Royal Ball. At Bouchercon.

The drinks tray is coming. They must have divined that I want to celebrate the idea that mine will not be the only arrival when I get home.