Chaos Distilled

When Darius crossed from the sky bridge into the new terminal at La Guardia, he had one mission: to get home.

He was born in New York. He would most likely die in New York. And whenever he left New York, he always felt anxious. The other cities were too stagnant, too quiet. They lacked the embrace of chaos. Darius liked the chaos.

The airport was never a place to dither. It was a liminal space between familiar chaos and the unfamiliar order of a world outside the metropolis. It was in these liminal spaces that Darius limited his time. Not because it was unenjoyable. Rather, it was the physical embodiment of knowing you are not where you want to be.

Whether it was arriving or departing, he limited his time in airports. If he was returning from business, he’d go barn mad. He’d race past folks to get back to the brownstone flat with unfinished brick walls he’d call home. He’d fly down the stairs just to bring him closer to the smell of downstairs neighbor’s spliffs, the acrid smoke drifting past his window and inevitably into his flat.

But when he saw a 45-foot tall mosaic of faces grimacing, multicolored but uniform in their horror, Darius paused. It was unignorable. The faces stared lifelessly at him. Sixty faces placed in a frame and hung against a white marble wall. The horror. The pain. He dropped his bags.

He stared at the massive installation. Like a boulder in a river, the flow of people moved around him. The people, with their phones and headphones and coffees and boarding passes flapping in the unmistakably stale breeze of an airport, matched the faces that Darius couldn’t look away from. It was chaos, organized. Distilled and displayed for all to see. But only Darius stopped to open his eyes.