High Anxiety

I noticed the small, dark-skinned man with the ill-fitting blue suit as soon as he walked into the area where I was sitting at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. I was reading a newspaper, waiting to board a flight to Los Angeles, when he caught my eye. Rumpled and holding his boarding pass tightly, he had no coffee, no carry-on luggage, no book or magazine.

He seemed nervous. He was jumpy. He stared a lot--first at me, then at a young woman a few seats to my left, then at an even younger woman across from us. For a moment the man just stood there, shifting his eyes from one to the other. He then fixed his gaze on a well-dressed businessman who was so engrossed in his novel that he didn't seem to notice. The dark-skinned man abruptly sat down next to the businessman, nudged him with his elbow, showed him his boarding pass and spoke to him in a language that I did not recognize.

The startled businessman jerked upright, squeezed an inch or two away from the stranger and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, "I don't know, ask them." He pointed in the direction of the airline's gate attendants. As soon as the man got up and walked toward the gate, the four of us, without uttering a word, exchanged a look that said: That was weird. Really weird.

The others went back to what they had been doing--reading, chatting on a cellphone, eating a bite of lunch--before the man in the blue suit appeared. But by then, he had my full attention. I watched him approach the gate attendants, both of whom were helping other passengers. Again, the man seemed oblivious to the concept of personal space. He walked past the line of travelers waiting to be helped, stepped up to the counter and stood shoulder to shoulder with the passenger at the head of the line. It was as if he hadn't noticed her there.

He shoved his boarding pass into the hand of a gate attendant. She took it from him and nodded her head, pointing first to the gate entrance and then at her watch. She held up 10 fingers as if to indicate that it would be 10 minutes before the flight began boarding. The man turned around and walked back toward me and the others. He sat down next to the businessman, giving him a tad more space this time, and proceeded to fidget and stare at us anew.