The Ferraro Displacement

The displacement of Marco Anthony Ferraro from Adelaide Airport is one of the stranger arrivals in the founding-era record of Bixbus. Two men converged on the same back-of-house supply closet within a few minutes of each other, for entirely unrelated reasons. Neither had any expectation of finding the other there.

Luke Smith had flown into Adelaide that morning with a Portal Key in his pocket and no luggage to explain his presence in an airport at all. He was conducting the scouting work that had occupied much of his time since the founding of Bixbus — walking public buildings and cataloguing back-of-house spaces in which a Portal could be activated without witness. The supply closet at the T-junction behind the Gate 14 bathrooms was an unremarkable door in an unremarkable corridor. He had selected it for the same reasons any cleaner in the building already knew it intimately: no camera coverage, minimal foot traffic, and a lock that worked.

Marco Ferraro had been employed as a cleaner at Adelaide Airport for approximately two years. He was approaching that same closet at the moment Luke stepped inside it, not because he had any reason to expect a man to be there, but because the closet sat on his standing restock route. He had paused twelve metres back up the corridor to respond to a message on a dating application from a profile identified only as TravellerDan. The man behind that profile was an unrelated third-party traveller killing time between flights in another part of the terminal, with no connection to Luke Smith whatsoever. At the moment Marco reached the supply closet, the real TravellerDan was walking toward an entirely different bathroom to meet Marco there. He waited in that bathroom for some fifteen minutes before leaving to catch his flight, unaware that anything had gone wrong.

Luke's first action on being discovered in the closet was to pull Marco toward him and kiss him — a deflection intended to purchase the seconds he needed to think of a better option. The deflection became an encounter because Marco did not push him away. The door was closed. Over the minutes that followed, Marco undressed fully in the dark and was entirely naked by the time Luke reached for the Portal Key in his pocket. Luke had only gone as far as shedding his jacket and shirt and opening his jeans.

Luke activated the Portal Key. He turned Marco so his back was toward the open transit, and he shoved him through it. Marco fell backwards through the Portal and landed in the dust of Bixbus, naked, with nothing on his body and nothing in his hands.

Luke did not follow. He gathered Marco's clothes from the concrete floor of the closet — the hi-vis vest, the work shirt and trousers, the underwear, the work shoes, the belt — and threw them through the Portal in a loose bundle. He then grabbed an armful of cleaning supplies from the shelves and threw those through as well, so that the materials would give Marco something to hold on to and something to explain his arrival with. Then he deactivated the Portal and the closet went ordinary again.

Luke tucked himself back into his jeans, pulled his shirt and jacket back on, and wheeled Marco's abandoned cleaning cart back to the Gate 14 bathroom. He washed his face at the basins until the colour had faded from his cheeks and walked out of the terminal. The airport's cameras had recorded nothing that could have explained what had just happened inside a closet they did not cover. It was another hour before anyone noticed that one of the cleaners had not returned to the staff room.