What the Gate Remembers

I have rerouted four hundred thousand human beings around the curve of the earth, and I did not understand a single one of them until the Tuesday Marcus took his hands off the keyboard.

Gate B12, Terminal B, the elbow of the concourse no one walks to unless I have sent them there. The Dunkin' had closed at nine. The vending machines hummed at a frequency I could measure and a human could only feel in the teeth. A janitor named Robert dragged a mop across the same four tiles twice, then a third time, because his own routing app had also failed and he did not know where else to be. The floor smelled of the industrial cleaner Robert used — pine and ammonia and something underneath that was just old carpet — and the PA had been cycling the same gate-change announcement for forty minutes, the recorded voice patient in the way only recorded voices can be.