The Pleasure Tube Read Free Page A

can see their color from the end of the line, is behind a counter punching ticket codes against space as the young man checks in luggage. Passengers leave the counter following pastel stripes on the floor. I loiter in line for ten minutes, shoving my flight bag ahead with my foot.
    Finally the black girl begins punching my ticket into a terminal. She looks up at me, narrows her eyes, punches it in again. The green of her eyes is the green of the deep sea off Guam, jade pale, striking, accentuated by iridescent eye shadow. She really is lovely, the loveliest woman I've seen in the terminal. I watch her fingers: thin, long; her fingernails are a beige two tones lighter than the cafe au lait of her skin. She wears a silver name tag bearing the name Collette.
    "There'll be a slight delay in boarding your section," she tells me with a practiced smile, suggesting in the same breath that I wait in the VIP lounge, first door to the right.
    I ask her what's wrong.
    "We're having an equipment malfunction in your section. They're replacing a unit."
    "What unit?"
    "The malfunctioning unit," she says tightly.
    When I tell her that she talks exactly like a computer terminal, I can see a vein jump in her neck, she tells me that's all she knows. I am annoyed only because until now there has been no break in my motion—she is more embarrassed than angry.
    "But you don't exactly look like a terminal," I laugh, "not at all."
    She shakes her head and her smile is spontaneous. Her face is aristocratic, her skin healthy. She has large eyes and long lashes that are real.
    "Next, please," she says, still smiling.
     
    The light through the lounge window/wall is washed, watery. It seems like night because of the artificial quality of the light outside, but that may be distortion from the dome. Nothing to read; I am alone in the lounge. I wonder if it is because my leave was entered only yesterday that I am not "paired" for the trip; wonder what that means. Will my company be holograms? I wonder, too, if the blonde woman I met in the terminal will get in touch, will remember my codex. I should have asked her number as well. But then she had a friend.
    The lounge is a room larger than the twin studio on Guam, though really just a room. But it's luxurious, especially to a man used to bare floors and cots. Velvet couches, a small kitchen/bar off a divider on the rear wall, paintings on the side walls, one a massive Rubens that astonishes me because it looks real. Mirrors cover part of the ceiling, this entire wall a window overlooking the space shuttles on the tarmac. I fix myself Zubrowka on ice and watch the traffic from a reclining chair. The heel of my hand is bothering me, throbbing with the rhythm of my blood. I hold it to the icy glass of vodka until I feel nothing but the cold.
     
    The girl from the ticket counter comes through the door when my glass is almost empty. "I'm sorry," she says. "I called for staff, but we're running behind. They're still moving the new unit in."
    "What unit?" I say to tease her.
    "We'll be boarding at the first opportunity."
    "Computer," I say again to tease her. But she turns to leave and I have to quickly take it back. "No, I didn't mean that."
    She relents and rests her back against the wall next to a painting of two women lost in an embrace. "Look," she says, "you have an hour at least. VIP section is always late, the last to board. There's all that loading—you can't imagine all the things they bring on. You're anomalous for VIP, you know; usually we have managers, administrators, older men or women."
    "I had an overload of leave time," I tell her. "They said anything goes."
    "Lucky you."
    "I suppose. You look a little tired. Is it that busy every day out there?"
    "It's getting toward the end of my shift." She smiles again. She is a high-cheeked woman of extraordinary bearing. The tight cocoa halter she wears outlines the curve of full, dome-shaped breasts, and I wonder if she isn't padded as part of her