Where are we? Abraham asks. Tucson, says Moses. The international airport. Let’s hop us a jetliner to gay Paree. Moses wanders the runways and the hangars, admiring the monolithic machines. The fences are mostly intact so there are almost no slugs to interrupt his constitutional, and he wonders at what a vast museum the world has become. The paint on most of the planes has been bleached to dull fade by the desert sun. Many are docked at their gates, long hollow gantries connecting them to the body of the terminal itself. Others are abandoned at random places on the tarmac, their doors gaped wide, some with their deflated yellow emergency slides spilled flaccidly on the ground. Moses raises his palms and feels the long, smooth underbellies of the aircraft. When he was young, and the world was not as it is today, there was a great deal he took for granted. He was a young man when things went sour, only two decades old – and for all the seeing he did, he might as well have been blind.
