I <3 TSA: A narrative
The most staggering technological and engineering feat known to man is gatekept by a humiliation ritual.
Airplanes are the technological sublime, massive hunks of steel only marginally mimetic of nature's natural fliers. The TSA is the bureaucratically sublime. The vast expanse of that-day-designed rope mazes, a labyrinth into which you enter without knowledge of when your eventual exit will be, cryptic riddles shouted out to you by wandering employees that differ by region, state, and city — chilling. A more significant aesthetic experience is hard to find.
Now, this last trip we took felt more than any other like a Kafkan dream, not least because traveling with a baby carted about in stroller and car seat requires extreme project management (and also multiplies TSA agent ire in your direction), but because the very LOGOS of the workers seemed to be contrary to the natural one, their words suggesting their intellectual souls had been malformed from the womb of Chaos by a demiurge (the federal government). Our flight left from Newark International, that has in the immediate past renovated ("reimagined" in their marketing script that papers the temporary walls where they promise bathrooms will stand, taunting me as I hit another dead-end corner with a desperate animal anxiety) their terminal — a renovation that, in a friend's recent landing, caused the ostensibly simple yet expansive announcement from the captain: "We are trying to figure out how to connect the walkway to the plane." This after he felt in his inner ears the plane inch back and forth several times. Just as the walkway was about to fulfill its telos, a flight attendant let the stupefied passengers know glass shards had mysteriously appeared in the aisle. There would be no leaving until they could be cleaned.
Let me then begin a chronicle of my wife and I's experience:
After we had parked our car, cleaned up the mystifying gallons of spit-up our 3-month old seems to conjure, and walked ourselves through an Escherian escalator corridor to the baggage check, we found a great bustle around the self-serve kiosks. A surprisingly civil touch screen interface gets people through this step quite quickly, but is immediately bottlenecked by the human labor required to check an ID and toss those cases up onto that first conveyor belt one meets at the airport, whereon my baggage is alchemically transmuted into etheric substance for all I know, and I rely simply on the theological virtue of hope that my possessions will arrive with essence and accidents intact. So it was that the post-kiosk line snaked around the kiosks themselves.
Yet, did my eyes deceive me? There was, only a short 30 yards or so away, a fairly open line and a few workers leisurely checking and chucking bags. We rolled our baby and luggage over the empty expanse, away from the rubes inflicted with a local blindness.
With great confidence I led us into the rope labyrinth. Its turns blindsided me. Though there was no line, the weave and weft of the thing seemed to carry us for many steps further away from those chatting workers, then, after a laborious stroller tack, tantalize us with proximity, only to amble us away from relief. At some point in this journey, after smiling apologetically to my wife as I step on her Birkenstocked toes during a tight cornering maneuver, I looked up and locked eyes with a United agent. I smiled to inform her of our intention. Maybe this was an error. As I cast my eyes down to finish the turn (during which my son gave to me a gaze, a warning that, if his environment continued rapidly changing, and the direction of progress with it, some ghastly combination of noise and fluid would be flung from his tiny person), I received an intuitive fear that even this first episode was not nearing its end. I looked up again, and saw the trinity of workers dispersing. Two floated behind a door, while the third, who I knew had turned aside her eyes at the very moment of my reglancing, was walking away.
I shuddered. My wife, in psychophysical sympathy, gasped. Our baby kicked one leg, disturbing his blanket. We hurried our steps as much as we could, chasing this vagrant. Taking initiative, and in loud voice, I made a repetition of the obvious: "Ma'am, sorry, could you just check us in real quick?"
Hardly turning, she said, "Well, yes, of course."
She did not stop walking.
At length, her reply was eventually rendered true by her actions, for after we had crossed the entire length of the labyrinth traversed, she stopped at the final terminal and grabbed our IDs. In seconds she had tagged our suitcase and tossed it onto the conveyor belt. I thanked her. Wordless, she nodded and smiled. From another door, two workers appeared. We walked in parallel with them, in unnerving silence, until they once more took up their posts, false cherubims of a false Eden, 30 yards out from the snaking kiosk line.
I have since discerned that, though strange, this interaction hardly compares with the baffling orders of the TSA that followed, for this poor woman was a United representative, merely osmosing the manic energies of the watchers in the department so close, amplified by the full-body microwave sensors blasting travelers to no avail other than gut microbiome disruption.
So we approached the next labyrinth, clearly constructed with no formal cause, only final (mass unsettling of mind). First, to enter the ride, you must show your boarding pass screenshotted on your phone to an agent or two. Had I been paying attention to anything other than the dadmath juggling of plane takeoffs, diaper changes, and infant feedings, I might have noticed the brows that became increasingly furrowed the deeper they were found in the line.
As it were, I presented my phone absentmindedly and received my first command:
"Turn up the brightness there."
There were no scanners here. The philosopher in me would have desired inquiry, but by God's providence I was occupied by the arithmetician in me, and thus docilely pumped the brightness.
"That is a fine pass, there."
My arithmetic paused. The first quizical furrow etched itself in my forehead. She saw my look, and said, "Move on ahead, no time."
I was pushed by the posterior flow of travelers about to encounter these sentinels. I saw in a similarly novel facial feature my wife's similarly typed encounter.
Not much later, we stood on the other side of a temporary glass wall, where a wide walk had been carved in the haphazard maze to allow for K9 sniffing. I watched (tall enough to see over the opaque fabric walls) a man with a visible liquid flow from his forehead walk nervous on the balls of his feet, whiteknuckling a duffel bag that the muscles in his eyesockets strained towards but the will resisted. The dog sniffed dutifully and a stoic TSA agent waiting at the end flashed this gentleman a goofy grin. Standing on the other side of the ordeal, he looked at his line neighbor and theatrically wiped the sweat from his brow, puffing his lips out into a "phew!"
As my family was about to step into that arena, an agent waded through a sea of empty rope halls toward us, bearing the look of a ranger of the wastes, a survivalist. He unclipped the nearest barrier and beckoned all in our vicinity through. Providence: I clasped my wife's hand, gripped the stroller, and walked us past the zig-zagging hound, holding firm to our original vocation. Those behind us poured into the void that promised much. I swear, as we crossed the halfway mark, I heard a voice out of the American West call to us:
"You'll find with us a love of doin' things that's wild and strange, to split with herd and wander wide, and learn out here the language of the range."
In an earlier life that call may have seduced me. I was particularly moved by the sincerity and delectability the last three words were enunciated with. But with a baby of tenuous calm under my care, I choose the queue I see for the queue I don't.
We arrive at the final post before the real humiliation. So far, the degradings we have suffered are ambient, a product of sheeplike shuffling and tight compaction. Beyond the actual boarding pass scan lies the realm of declothing, unpacking, and unbottling, all at the beck of the cockswain pacing behind the rolling metal dowels. My phone is still lit as the morning star, yet it does not pass muster. The scanner refuses to assent. With a raised eyebrow, the slight agent slumped in his seat behind the plexiglass wall:
"So strange it is for phones set such as yours To feel the horrid hell of harsh rejection, Stung by a cousin molded for her form, That fails procession of her bright injection."
With sudden, telescoping superclarity I perceived similar quatrains rolling from the tongues of the guards around me. This was no unique case, nor was I mad, for I saw these harmonious numbers act like a verbal EMP, blasting with ecstasy the travelers moments from their greatest sufferings. I reached my hand back where it met my wife's, waiting both to give and receive comfort. Our son whimpered.
"Should... I guess I'll try to scan it again?"
But the agent was looking now at our baby boy, smiling.
"What hair and life inside that tiny frame! And seated all within that tiny seat, Of which in moments will be parcelled down And crammed in bins; no leisurely done feat."
"I'm sorry, should I just scan—"
Lifting his eyes toward the drywall ceiling, the agent ignored me and began:
"I prophesy this sweet and gentle boy Will, lifted from his mobile throne, release An aural tempest dense with ragged shrieks, To be beheld direct by cochlea As he upon your shoulder perches rough, And in such state—"
"I just can't get this darn scan to work, huh.."
"—your body will be parsed By mortal engines vile with ineffect, While all your artifacts are quartered with A careless disposition, and, as a hound's olfactory will out the contraband, Your fluids with a volume greater than The regulation ounce of 3.4 Will wastefully and wantonly be trashed."
So saying, he slithered a tentacular arm out from under the transparent shield and grabbed my phone, swiping it with a practiced ease over the glass, receiving an instant beep and affirmative emerald flash. Another whimper, and another squeeze of the hand. The agent handed my phone back with a wink, leaving a layer of palm grease upon the case, which I promptly removed and stuffed into my backpack. In my periphery, out beyond the edges of the line, I saw a tattered-looking group drawing nearer than farther than nearer again, an odyssey led by that drawling wanderer with unknown end and mysterious telos.
I was frayed, my fortitude under powerful attacks. How much time had passed? Had we missed our flight? Was it still the same day? Or worse, were we occupying the same minute in which the thing had begun, stretched into an artifical eternity to be followed by 25 more, a reasonable quantity to expect but dreadful quality to experience.
But now, exiting the wandering paths of the queue, we enter the arena, wherein the actual goal of the procedure is supposedly fulfilled.
I am met with choice. One of these lines, I know, funnels through one of those hifi scanners that for some entirely opaque reason does not require electronics larger than a cell phone to be removed from the gizzard of a backpack. And so I heard, just as this thought had been actualized in the locus of my experience, a giddy voice:
"...and electronics can stay in the bag!"
It was the excited exclamation of a traveler in a line off to my left, directed, I imagine, toward their partner with delight. With gusto I pushed us off that-a-way, hopeful that our time in this purgatory was coming to an end. Our baby whimpered, and loosed a warning and guttural gurgle. My wife tensed and stepped ahead of me, starting the shoe removal and bag binning process with proactive excellence while I manhandled the stroller into an unobstructive position.
Behind those rolling bars was a young man in (could it be?) a well-fitting security vest. He paced serenely, reassuring the harrowed passengers that, yes, their possessions could all remain wrapped up secure through the scanner. His slightly pomaded hair had a neat sheen, put together and well ordered, not barking nor speaking in prophetic verse.
My wife's materials were binned. My laces were loosed and heel removed when an agent emerged.
"Stroller?"
A beat. I straightened, and looked at him, then down at the faux-leather grip of the stroller I had a hand, that I had been using to stabilizae myself during the deshoeing.
"Um... yes?"
Upon the agent's face, patchy bearded and pomadeless, a sinister and Seussically-twisting grin grew. Without a word, and, with a certain nightmarish quality in the way the rest of his body did not gravitationally compensate, externally rotated his shoulder to bring his arm behind him, and pointed off toward another line. My pupils dilated.
"Wait, but, look, we've already got bins set on the tracks, and—"
By then my wife had realized what was occurring. She saw the slight but unmistakable, to the intimately bound, quiver in my hand as I waved broadly back to guide the agent's attention toward my wife's handiwork, attempting to earn his mercy.
But there is no mercy there. Only law.
Like Shylock demanding his pound of flesh, the agent, having reset his shoulder during my appeal, simply rerotated it back and pointed once again.
"Stroller."
My jaw was hanging open. I slowly turned away from this biomechanically unnatural creature, and moved to help my wife unload the just-loaded bins. As we, shocked, began to reach toward the bins to undo her labors, the graceful creature on the other side of the bars stopped us with a simple palms-down gesture on the bin and a winsome smile. Grace? An exception being made? I let out a long breath, and returned his smile.
"Yes, thank you, we still have to get the stroller down, and I've no idea how long this has taken so far, I hope we're still on track to make our flight but I really just don't know, I really don't."
He waited for me to finish. Then, with an elegant motion, he lifted the two bins my wife had prepared at that point and set them upon a cart already in motion, pushed at speed by a gremlinish employee that had emerged from an impossibly small alley between rope corridor and scanner. Somehow, in that perfect movement, that beacon of hope had spirited my wife's Birkenstocks from their place in the bin and returned them to her. This was not actually helpful, as the cart was already off behind us and moving speedily through the crowd at the hands of a practiced navigator. With a vigorous jerk, I pivoted the stroller and ran off after our possessions, my laces constantly threatening to get caught in the large back wheels, my wife barefoot and clutching her sandals.
The guard that scanned our passes was still speaking in the prophetic mode as we passed. His gift was about to be affirmed as that small-statured cart-pusher led us to a line that had just opened. A boon for the unencumbered, but quite unfortunate for new parents that benefitted from the preparatory line of the queue, which is typically the only thing of any certainty in TSA purgatory past the labyrinth. It is there that we could have gotten our affairs in order and passed the detectors in an orderly fashion. As it was, we were thrust into the head of the line with a significant task ahead of us, destined to hold everyone up and anger the populace.
Upon our arrival, we were greeted with a stern inquiry:
"How small does that stroller fold up?"
I was, at that point, already in the process of several tasks, including but not limited to slinging my backpack onto the metal table to remove an e-reader and laptop, hunching over to remove my shoes, and snagging the diaper bag in the stroller from its spot under the car seat. I did not quite know how to answer this question — approximate with my hands, demonstrate the fold up process, or describe it verbally. I did not choose. Without fully unhunching, I put my hands some distance from each other (a shoe was in my right), said, "Small," without much confidence, and made an inaccurate dumb show with those raised hands of the enfolding process.
In response, this woman, rotund and hobbling about, merely nodded. It was not a nod of command, or of suggestion, of affirmation, or anything of determinable message. It was more dismissive than anything, as a great pack had formed at the table spreading behind us, and her duty required her to bark orders to get the thing moved along. I could only assume that the stroller must be put on the infernal conveyor belt, so I jostled my little boy out of his seat and tossed him over my shoulder. My mind was lost in anticipation the next steps (shoes, bag, bin, laptop, e-reader, belt), yet in that hoisting motion I twisted to the left and found myself locking eyes with the prophet. His lips were moving, but I could not hear him. I noticed, in that instantaneous exchange (a moment that could accurately be described as the opposite of eternity), the deep furrows on the brows of a fellow iPhone owner, whose screen flashed fruitlessly over and over the scanner. Then the child on my shoulder flipped his head around so that his voice would be directed with pinpoint precision into my inner ear. Little more on that matter needs to be said. Suffice to say, the masses behind, already aggravated by their own odysseys, forced to wait for this obviously unpracticed nuclear unit to unpack their gear, now had to distinguish the critical commands the agent was lashing out over the already aptly described aural tempest.
My wife — having completed the grave matter of removing her laptop from her bag so that the scanner can detect and flag the tragically 4 oz bottle of face wash that lies within, which the devilish agent, cog in the machine of banal evil, will toss away without remorse or sympathy, though not before noting the brand (my wife has wonderful skin) — now moves to unhitch, unlink, and uncouple the various components of our stroller, while I hinge with vigor at, specifically, the L2 and L3 vertebra in order to then wrench the bags we have been carting around onto the conveyor belt. A cacophony of clicking is audible to everyone but me (utterly enveloped in the soundscape my baby was producing), sourced from the many mechanisms at work in the sleek, Nordic stroller and in my lower back. My wife informed me later that, as the last component of the stroller disappeared under the rubber flaps, the cockswain agent cruelly informed her that "those don't have to go through the scanner." Thus rendering her question about its size a perplexing riddle, unsolvable, a testament to the illogic of the operation.
It is impossible in prose and exceedingly difficult in poetry to convey the distress of those final moments. The sensory afflictions of back pain and extreme eardrum flexion were compounded by the moral agony of Holding Up The Line. As a man of integrity I retain some responsibility, though perhaps this narrative will absolve me and shift the bulk of the blame to the structural indecencies of this liminal area. One final image to describe is the random search to which I was subjected, with infant still upon shoulder. I stepped through the more primitive metal detector without issue and tried to bolt like a beagle off his leash toward our binned stuff and the promised end of the adventure. I was stopped by an arm held extended and tipped with blue gloves. I turned and saw an artist, who was already assessing me, as though engaging in a preliminary ocular pat-down before the main event. In one motion, this agent, intent upon his craft, bends a knee and knifes his hand into the space between my legs at knee height. I registered what was about to happen and screwed my eyes shut. That gloved hand, with some speed and force, traced up my inner thigh and, yes, traveled just one length too far, sending a horrid electrical shock up my body. My son must have received some indication of his father's pain and decided to still the storm at that point. I did not look the man in his eyes as I stumbled past to rejoin my wife at the bins.
The event ends with her calming our son as we sat dazed upon the metal-lattice benches placed for the recuperation of the weary and humiliated. Somehow, we had not missed our flight (the whole thing took 15 minutes). Yet, though our ticket remained whole, it was as though something vital had been taken from us. I felt crushed under a boot heel, flattened like a Looney Tunes character, incapable of proper cognition, so clouded was my sight by the constant revival of memory's images — the angry mob behind us as eager as us to escape the trial, the deficient nod of the agent in response to my response, wanderers among the ropes, the drug smuggler satisfied, the expert weaving with his cart... Nothing to learn, nor anything accomplished. An X-Acto knife, used in a project long ago and forgotten, sat primly in the side pocket of my backpack, visible even to the naked eye.
Poetic. A bug’s life. Wormwood’s jigsaw.