4338.212 · July 31, 2018 AD
The Clothes Came After
A cleaner pushes his cart toward a supply closet he has mapped twice over. A traveller with no luggage has stepped off a flight from Hobart looking for a door that will hold a Portal. Neither knows the other is coming. Neither can explain what they find when the door opens. What happens in the dark is an improvisation on one side and a mistranslation on the other, and by the time it is over, one of them has left Adelaide Airport by a means its cameras have no way of recording.
The morning at Adelaide Airport is doing what the morning at Adelaide Airport always does. The Sydney wave is landing on top of the Melbourne wave. The coffee carts are running hot. A cleaner named Marco Ferraro is working his way through the men's near Gate 14 in the rhythm he has been working in for two years. Forty-three metres away, a stranger on a dating application is waiting for him in a bathroom near the Virgin lounge. At the other end of the terminal, Luke Smith is coming off the Hobart flight with a Portal Key in his pocket and no luggage to explain his presence in the building at all. He is looking for a door. He is not looking for Marco.
The supply closet at the T-junction behind the Gate 14 bathrooms stands slightly ajar, propped open with a yellow cleaning bucket. Luke steps inside. Marco arrives three minutes later with his cart, the front-left wheel squeaking the same complaint it has been squeaking since March. The door opens. The improvisation begins. What happens in the dark is something neither man planned, one of them is running from, and only one of them understands before the Portal opens. When it closes again, Marco's cart is still outside the door. His shift has thirteen minutes left on the clock. The cameras have nothing they will later be able to account for.
