Love in a Lost World by Cass Francis

Has the world ever been alive without the threat of dying?

Alex did not know. She worked as a lost luggage detective at DFW airport, and she was in love with @miss_moon who posted hourly jabs about the futile modern world. Facts and statistics about how the earth is dying due to climate change and capitalist-designed technology. @miss_moon’s profile picture depicted a woman in a white shirt and with jagged brown hair. Eyes black with thought and soft curves of skin over high cheekbones soft and pure as distant mountains. Sometimes, Alex tapped on the picture to study it closer. She both wished she knew @miss_moon and wished she was her.

Every day, carts of lost baggage and other items came to her office. She and three others worked in cubicles behind the wall of the lost and found area of the airport. They had metal tables where they inspected and labeled and catalogued each item. Stuffed animals, dolls, books, various electronic devices, and suitcases left behind on planes and at gates. After cataloguing everything, they divided up the items among themselves. They began searching for clues pointing to the identities of the owners of the lost items. They took the items back to their desks behind their cubicles and they began clicking away on their computers to find the owners.

Often, she kept the @miss_moon profile open on a tab in her browser as she searched.

Today, she was working through a small suitcase. Unlabeled but found near the gate for a flight going to Phoenix, Arizona. The suitcase was of bright pastel colors, pink and yellow and a nearly neon blue. She did not know how it could have been      left behind. When she unzipped it and flipped it open the contents were a scrambled mess. The bag of a child who had spent time in this area and was now returning home. Included were some picture books showcasing cartoon animals that grinned underneath bubble letters. Two small plastic toy cars. An empty plastic water bottle decorated with Disney characters. Underneath the miscellaneous items were      crumpled clothes. Alex held them up. A pair of jeans, a sweatshirt, t-shirts, all strangely adult except for their miniscule size. The suitcase, in her estimation, must belong to a child of about five or six.

By the time she had removed all the items from the suitcase and put them out on her desk with the labels facing up, she was in tears.

A voice came over the intercom. This is a special security announcement. Please maintain control of your personal belongings at all times…

***

Alex took this job because she had always loved airports but was not friendly enough to be a flight attendant, not rich enough to pursue a pilot’s license, and not mean enough to be a security guard. She had been out of work for nearly a year since dropping out of college. She had only applied to jobs at the airport and had been turned down for all of them. Custodian, fast food cashier, bartender, baggage handler. Even her friends who had gotten their degrees weren’t finding the jobs they wanted, so at the time she kept on living with her parents and helping around the house and had little hope for the future beyond that. Then she applied to the lost and found office job. She went to an interview. The supervisor looked over her skeptically and stared at her resume and not her eyes. Weeks passed afterwards, and she had been sure she’d been turned down. Then the supervisor called. Said a couple other applicants had turned down offers for the role and asked did she want the job.

Airports made Alex feel a calm that others must have felt sitting on a beach by the ocean. Growing up, she had lived in Georgia with her mother, but every other weekend would fly to her father in California. She grew up around the weary bustle, the people watching, the friendly pleasure of adults day drinking and talking with strangers and their solitary smiles of occupying their own time, waiting for their flights back home or away.

During her lunch break she went into the belly of the airport and watched the people come and go. The space blurred with their presence. The light came in soft and blue from the windows and the escalator hummed. Suitcase wheels whirred on the tile.

Has the world ever been alive without the threat of dying? @miss_moon had posted. Existential threat seems a core part of human civilization, @miss_moon had continued. People have a way of thinking the world only gets its meaning from what matters to us as humans, from what we have known. Famine. Illness. Nuclear war. We worry constantly that we will be lost.

Alex could feel the outside heat bleeding in from the window against her back. People went by.

@miss_moon had no location listed on her page but she often posted details and pictures that made Alex believe she was probably in San Francisco. Even before getting the luggage detective job, Alex had been a pattern seeker. Her mind pulled facts together to try to find the sum of their parts. Streets of steep hills, a sign that said Fisherman’s Wharf, a bar with a Giants flag against the wall.

In the airport a woman and child passed by. The child toddled and squealed. Alex thought of the bag she was currently working with, the labeled items spread across her desk.

***

No report had been filed yet regarding a lost bag that fit the description of this one. There were no names written in the front of the books or on the tags of the clothing.

Alex first checked the list of people on the flight to Phoenix for any families with children. There were two. One adult with the same last name as a seven-year-old and two adults with the same last name as a five-year-old. Alex saw the age and decided to call that family first. She dialed one of the listed numbers and the other line rang and rang until the man picked up. They talked. No, they had not noticed any missing luggage. Alex thanked the man and hung up and dialed the other family. A woman answered. She also had not noticed anything missing. Alex thanked her. The line went dead and she brought the phone down to the table.

The picture books had well-worn spines and the clothes were thin and frayed along the hems, the shirts stretched around the neck. Alex could imagine a parent tugging them down onto a squirming child.

The flight that left the gate before the Phoenix one had gone to Pensacola, Florida. Alex imagined the beaches, a child running and tripping in the sand, the particles of sand like pixels and the earth moveable and malleable. Small child hands patting a molded castle. The waves washing against it and the child laughing and fighting the water, the sea itself.

One of her coworkers came over. A meaty man with dirty hands that smelled of sausage and motor oil. He fingered the labels of the clothes.

Some kid, he said.

Yep.

Making any headway?

Some, maybe.

Kids are hard to track down.

He ran a finger down the smooth cover of one of the picture books. The cover had been folded and crumpled in places, with thick lines like veins that caught his touch among the smoothness.

Working on a tablet, myself, he said. Giving me fits. It’s a nice one too. One of those new iPads with the keyboard and pen and everything. I can’t believe what people leave behind.

***

In college, Alex had studied criminal justice after first trying out theater and computer science. She was one of those curious and dreaming people who thought of a career almost like a costume, and ultimately she could not decide on a life in which she could not change out of for a different performance. When she got pregnant, it was a relief. A baby was nothing but dreams and care. A day-to-day presentness that calmed her mind.

She had not yet known how love and loss go hand in hand.

The airport had a grayness to its air from its cool paint to the silver steel tables at security and in the back rooms where luggage was sorted. The light coming through the windows felt gray. So did the fluorescent lights from somewhere up above. The planes a slick silver. When Alex had been a little girl, in art class at school during a lesson on color theory she took her finger paints and mixed them all together in one big gray mass. At first she had felt a thrill at what she had done, and then, as she began to draw, she had started to cry knowing there was no way to bring the other colors back.

In the airport though the gray was light, clean, and calming. Alex called the one family who had gone to Pensacola even though the child was listed as only two years old. They had lost no luggage.

Around one hundred thousand luggage items are lost per day at airports globally. Bags are left behind and missorted onto planes headed for distant cities far away from their owners. When she had first started her job, Alex had been shocked by the number of carts filled with lost things brought to her office per week. She was just as shocked at how often they were able to track down the owners.

The first item Alex had found the owner for had been a sweater left crumpled in the seat of a plane. The sweater was a bright red with a small white rose embroidered on the breast pocket. There was no name on the faded label. Alex followed as much procedure as she had been trained to follow. Check the passenger list. Think of what you would do if one of your belongings had been lost. Consider who the person might be who owned the item. Imagine their personality, their history, their life. Use an analytical approach in logic to consider what aspects of them were distinctive enough to be identifiable and searchable.

With the red sweater, Alex noted the names of the passengers who had been sitting in the seats where the sweater had been found. The passenger list included three possible names. A man and two women. She searched for them online. Found social media profiles and newspaper clippings.

Somehow she recognized the woman who owned the sweater instantly, even though she had never seen her      before. A woman with a wrinkled and pinched face but a proud joy in her eyes. Alex looked at her social media page. Her permed white hair and her smile blurred and pixelated. Out on a porch with a group of friends drinking wine. Another picture of a boy who must have been her grandson hugging her around the neck.

She called the woman. A rough and thin voice had      thanked Alex, unbelieving that she had tracked her down.

Alex had hung up the phone with a warm sense of accomplishment.

***

You sure you don’t want any help with that kid’s suitcase? said Alex’s meaty fingered coworker.

No, that’s okay.

It’s been a couple days.

That’s okay.

The items they could not find owners for, once all leads ran out, they stored in a backroom catalogued by date. After thirty days, the items were relocated to a warehouse where a company bought them in bulk and sight unseen. The company would sort and clean them and then sell them in a chain of thrift stores across the country.

I brought that iPad to a contact I have down at the police department, said the meaty fingered man now probing at one of his fingernails. One of those hacker-for-good types, you know. Met him at this open mic night the other day where we were both doing some stand up. He was okay. A little too Seinfeld-y for my taste. Those hey-what-is-the-deal-with-traffic type jokes. A little vanilla for me. I feel like I try to make my comedy more edgy, raw, a bit like social commentary but also surreal and out there. You know? But anyway he was able to get into the iPad and we found a name for the owner. I cross checked it with the passenger lists at the gate where it was found. Code cracked. Case closed.

I think I’m going to check the security cameras, said Alex. See if I can see who left the bag.

The man said something agreeable and benign, if skeptical, and eventually meandered back to his own desk.

Alex pulled up the security camera footage. They rarely used the footage as there was only so much use in staring at blurry strange faces with no names attached. They were looking for the owners of lost belongings and not suspects for a crime. The footage Alex had of the gate where the child’s bag had been found was just as blurry, the faces just as anonymous. She began playing the video backwards in slow motion starting from the timestamp of when the bag was picked up by security. People hurried by in reverse, their legs pixelated and indistinct and their faces too bright overblown colors among the desaturated gray of the walls and carpet. Among the bustle, the rows of seats remained unmoving. Like a boat floating on the surface of bobbing waves.

The child’s bag remained unmoving too. It sat underneath one of the seats and Alex watched it with her eyes straining to stay open as if one blink and it would be gone.

Her computer emitted a soft chime. The tab with @miss_moon’s profile open noted that there had been a notification.

And then, movement around the bag. Now a mother stood beside a child. The child swung his feet while sitting in the seat and the mother seemed to be speaking to him. The legs swung back and forth and in the routine of their motion they seemed to be the only thing going forwards as the rest of the airport moved around them in reverse.

The mother sat beside the boy. She scrolled on her phone. The boy took out the picture books and flipped through them from the back of the books to the beginnings.

Alex paused the video. She could make out nothing about the faces of the mother or the child.

She pressed play and let the video go forward to the moment they left the bag. They arose suddenly in between flights coming in at the gate. The mother gathered her things and helped the boy take off his coat and they hurried away out of the frame.

Things only become real and worthy of this world through their loss, @miss_moon had posted as a comment underneath the original post she had started earlier.

Alex believed @miss_moon infinitely interesting and deep but that did not mean she always agreed with her.

***

Alex went chasing the mother and child through the airport security cameras, each one offering a different skewed angle. The mother wore a skirt of overblown yellow and the child one of deep red. Even with the colors, it was hard to keep track of them among the crowd and the way each camera framed the airports differently, with little continuity. She blinked while alternating between views and they were gone. She played the recording back to find them again. Everyone else in the office had gone home and only Alex remained with her nose nearly touching her computer screen as if she could leap through it to the mother and child and call out to them and say: Wait! You forgot something.

She tracked them hurrying nearly thirty minutes later to the gate for a plane headed for Washington DC. The mother dragged the child along by the wrist and pulled her own bag with her other hand. She paused and fumbled to show their boarding passes to the attendant. Then she stopped, glanced around for a moment frantically, asking the child something. She looked up and down the airport. The hurrying strangers. Then they turned and disappeared down the hall to the plane.

When Alex called the woman with a six-year-old child listed on the DC flight, the voice that answered sent a shiver down her spine. The mother was astonished, grateful, described the lost bag with only the titles of the books a bit scrambled. Alex hung up the phone feeling warm.

In the empty office, the silence hummed.

Her computer dinged. A new post by @miss_moon, but Alex did not read it and instead closed her eyes for a moment.

Sometimes she felt an ache within her glowing and quiet like a full moon behind an overcast sky. Every morning she felt it when she lay blinking awake and every night she hugged it as she went to sleep. An ache deep within her echoing through her body and flesh and heat which she knew but could not trust. She felt it and all the lives that have been dreamed but never lived. When someone loses a limb, they sometimes have phantom feelings where the missing body part used to be. Tingling and itching and pain. But when missing something that had been not yet real the phantom pangs felt different. A quiet ache. Just enough for Alex to know she had not always felt it.

Cass Francis is a born and raised Texan who has lived everywhere from the piney woods of Nacogdoches to the dusty plains of Lubbock. She currently lives in the “funkytown” of Fort Worth. Find her on Instagram @cassfrancis.tx.