On the evenings of May 14th and 15th, 1995, ABC aired The Langoliers – a two-part horror miniseries by Stephen King. The Langoliers tells the tale of an American Pride Airlines Flight 29 which travels through a void in space and time.
Flight 29’s passengers are unconscious when they venture through the void. When they awaken, they find that most of the other crew and passengers have disappeared, leaving behind only their personal effects. One passenger, an off-duty pilot, manages to land the plane at the nearest airport despite no communication from the ground. But the survivors find the airport abandoned, and the world they inhabit dull and lifeless like Liverpool.
The air has no smell, food has no taste, and sounds produce no echo. There is no sign of people or their possessions, and the airport clock is frozen at 4:07. The passengers soon learn that the laws of physics don’t apply. Their environment is entropic, decaying – both ephemeral and eternal.
And all the while there is a strange sound in the distance that keeps on getting louder.
Between 19:30 and 20:30 on June 10th, 2022, we too passed through a void in space and time as we left for Liverpool and arrived back in Rome. We transitioned through the world of airport Duty-Free, Omega stores, and dozens of British tourists that Arnauld failed to notice, and entered into a dimension that was both alien and familiar. Dulled by four bottles of discounted pink prosecco.
Stepping out of the shuttle that took us to our gate, we emerged into a world of monitors without updates, boarding gates without Ryanair staff, and an internal phone system so basic that even we knew how to use it. Even the police officers who were called to intervene didn’t work for us, the stranded taxpayers, but for the airport itself—to keep people safe.
This was not Roma Fiumicino Airport Terminal 1 Gate E35, but an experiential void in the space-time continuum.
Having passed through passport control, we were neither in Rome, nor in Liverpool, but trapped in the twilight zone of Terminal 1 departures. We inhabited a realm without liability or accountability or viable alternative flights that went anywhere other than the Mediterannean.
Level-headed reason gave way to impulse and improvisation as we discussed driving to Pisa in order to catch a morning flight to Dublin, or fucking the whole thing off and going massive in Fiumicino.
At the end of The Langoliers, Flight 29’s survivors manage to return to their dimension by flying back through the boreal lights of the temporal void. We too transitioned back to the world of life and light among the brake lights of the midnight traffic on the autostrada outside Fiumicino. But when we climbed out of the taxi we decided to catch at the train station and breathed in Rome’s familiar air, we knew we too had made it. We were home.
