Baggage

He’s had this duffel for thirty years. Purchased it in Oakland near the cemetery where his father is buried. Brown canvas, with leather handles, it’s accompanied him to Yellowstone, to Boston, to the United Kingdom for a winter spent bartending in London, to a summer in Tangiers where he lived on red apples and harira, to those months in Reykjavik teaching American Poetry. Certainly weathered, but still not in need of replacement, he packs for a four-day trip to Montana to visit his cousin: blue jeans, Oxford shirts, socks, underwear, swim trunks, deodorant, a paperback copy of Garcia Marquez’s Until August.

He reaches the airport a few hours ahead of time. Leaves his car on the top floor of the garage, removes two hundred dollars in cash from an ATM, prints his boarding pass from an electronic kiosk.

The security line reminds him of those he used to see in front of the local movie theater when a highly-anticipated film was premiering; eager souls of all ages and manner of dress slowly making their way towards the entrance. Except here there are guard dogs, curt airline employees, anxious travelers frustrated at having to remove their belts and shoes and electronic devices from their pockets.

He places the duffel onto the conveyor belt and steps away to pass through the metal detector. The guard, after studying his electronic silhouette and deciding it free of any possible weapons, waves him through.

The man in front of him, pushing ninety, stares at his luggage, a gray suitcase whose handles are wrapped in duct-tape, and whose facade features an I Like Ike campaign sticker. The man reaches for the bag, then pauses, pulls his hand away, leans in, and looks into the conveyor tunnel. Seconds pass. The man squints, then turns his attention back to the suitcase before gingerly gripping its handle. Slowly the man lifts the bag and turns from the conveyor belt.

When the next bag comes it is not his duffel. It is instead a small blue backpack with rainbow-striped straps. A child’s bag, affixed with buttons for a few television shows that were popular forty years earlier.

Now he is the one who gazes into the small tunnel of the conveyor belt. The woman behind him, clearly annoyed at how long he is taking, grabs the next bag from the belt without even glancing in its direction.

Not that it matters. That bag isn’t his either. Nor the next, nor the next.

He looks down at the backpack and tries to place where he has seen one like it before. He remembers a shopping mall in the Fillmore District. He remembers his mother asking whether he preferred the blue or the red one. Asking whether he wanted one with rainbow-striped straps or without.

He was five years old. It was a week or two before his first day of school. New clothes had been bought. A new pair of Stride Rite shoes with green laces too. Also an E.T. lunchbox that featured the silhouette of a boy and his interstellar friend pedaling a flying bicycle across the moon.

He looks right and sees the woman kneeling down to study her bag with the concentration that an archaeologist would bring to a recently-unearthed bone fragment. Impatience has been replaced by something else, though he isn’t sure what. Confusion? Fear? Awe?

A security guard approaches to ask him if everything is alright.

“Yes. Sure. Fine,” he says, lifting the blue backpack from the conveyor belt.

After retying his shoes, and refastening his belt, and placing his wallet and keys back into the front pocket of his jeans, he walks towards a handful of empty chairs and tables in front of a closed bookstore.

He takes a seat and places the backpack on the table in front of him. He looks at the flow of travelers moving past him in both directions. Most of them are fixated on their phones, or their kids, or on locating the correct gate.

But there is the old man, and the impatient woman, and there is a woman in her late thirties, with brown hair and tattoos on both shoulders and a look of utter confusion on her face as she opens her suitcase. The woman places a hand to her mouth, then her eyes well up, and then she reaches inside.

There is another woman, this one somewhere in her sixties, with long silver hair and a summer tan and a suitcase that is certainly older than she is. The woman takes a seat in a row of empty seats beside a gate whose flight to Minneapolis has been delayed. The woman begins to unzip the bag, then stops. She shuts her eyes. Draws in a trio of deep breaths. When she reopens her eyes he looks away, figures that she, at the very least, deserves privacy in a moment like this.

He looks at his own bag. He feels like the main character from the first film he ever wrote, which was about a middle-aged poet who discovers a portal to another world in a dryer at his local laundromat. Except he’d never liked the way he’d ended the film, even though the director and actors all thought the ending was perfect. So perfect, in fact, that they barred him from the set when he kept insisting that it must be rewritten.

Except he can’t remember now what his alternate ending would have been. If it would have been one that would have explained more than the original ending had, or if it left more to the imagination. If the poet returned from the world of magic, or if he chose to remain.

Not that it matters. That was make-believe. A tale that had come to him when he was still a writer who believed that no story was ever truly finished.

Thank goodness, he thinks, he is no longer that type of writer.

Kareem Tayyar’s book Keats in San Francisco & Other Poems, was published in 2022 by Lily Poetry Review Books, and his work has appeared in journals including Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, and North Dakota Quarterly.