I walk past the ticket counters, up one row of polished chrome kiosks and down the next, looking for timetables and reading the screens, committing to memory yet another barrel load of aviation minutiae, if there's room for it, a habit I've always found useless but irresistible (I can tell you the flight number of Gulf Air's departure to Abu Dhabi).

Neither traveler nor employee, and seemingly on an aimless wander, I must look like I'm casing the place, and no doubt I'm being tailed by security, or at least followed by video cameras, buzzing and craning their electronic necks as I double back between Lufthansa and Turkish. Some man in a hidden room with a holographic Terminal One badge is watching me on his monitor, his walkie-talkie crackling, wondering if I've got a half-pound of Semtex strapped under my shirt. "Yeah, that's him. He just tried to get onto the Concorde up at the Lay-Space lounge."

Then at the Olympic counter I see the girl of my dreams. Why are airports so notorious for this brand of torture? Olympic's A340 has just left the gate, and she and her friends are closing up for the night. She picks up some papers and walks past me toward an unmarked door, and she is beautiful: angelic, with huge brown eyes and chubby cheeks and one of those short, geometric haircuts you think you'd see if you ever went to Paris, hair curving sharply chinward just beneath the ears. (I'll bet anything there's a woman working in the L'Espace lounge at this very moment with that same haircut.) But she isn't French, she's Greek, and I now go through a two-minute fantasy of falling in love, of first-class tickets to Athens and boat trips out to see the quiet parts of Rhodes and Santorini (not the rainy and crowded ones I saw with seasick Kirsten in 1992.)

I try to read her name as she passes. Who is she? Where is she going? Will she be making the hour's drive, as her fashion model coiffure might suggest, to some Upper West Side apartment or loft down in Soho? Her crisp brown uniform gives nothing away. For all I know she chain smokes, speaks no English, and lives in a three-room flat with an abusive husband in the Greek section of Queens, if there even is such a place. Maybe she spends her days wearing tight designer jeans and pushing a baby carriage, window shopping at shitty stores and eating week-old souvlaki at roach-infested restaurants, all while pulling down a cool $250 a week from the ticket desk at Olympic.

Boom, the white door slams and she is gone. Dazed and with that bottomed-out, punched-in-the-gut feeling you sometimes get when you see a beautiful girl, I head over toward the other airlines. And I'm thinking now (big mistake) about girls and apartments and lofts in Soho, and how I could have spent these two hours doing something in Manhattan, instead of not getting to see the Concorde at Kennedy Airport.

I had a girlfriend once, sort of, who lived in Manhattan. Not that she and I worked particularly hard at immortalizing our experiences there. We weren't exactly socialites, riding around in yellow cabs to the opera or parties at the Met. We hardly did anything, really, except sit around K's tiny apartment while she whined about her job and her life, ailments I could provide no antidote for, but that would, in time, be cured by the arrival of Mr. husband-to-be, an event that sent me skidding off various deep ends and into a long pattern of really poor decision-making. Somewhere in there I began flying cargo planes.

I near a bank of payphones where, on the floor, three African Muslims are crouched toward Mecca. Actually, they are crouched more toward Bridgeport, Connecticut. Being a pilot I tend to have a reflexive (conditioned, if not natural) awareness of compass points and things geographical, and I notice they are facing the wrong direction. I choose to tell them, and when I do they are surprised.

"This way?"

"No, this way."

"But," one of them says, and points toward a group of people further down. "He tole me."

"Who? Who told you?" I say. "He's wrong. It's that way." Apparently convinced, the men adjust their prayer rugs the extra eastward degrees and thank me.

The people he'd gestured at turn out to be a crowd of passengers checking in for Air Afrique. You've probably never heard of it, but Air Afrique is a strange little company based in West Africa. In fact it's the collective flag carrier of several different countries, coup-prone places you sometimes hear about on CNN as the government is being overthrown for the third time this year, like Senegal, Guinea, Mali and the Ivory Coast. They probably have about as many airplanes in their fleet as nations they represent. Their flight tonight, in a green and white Airbus A330 (parked somewhere, I can't see it) is heading to Dakar, and then on to Abidjan. I assume the disoriented Muslims back at the telephones will be on board.

The passengers, I notice, none of whom are white and many of whom are wearing what would generally be described as "traditional African dress" (multicolored boubous and wildly patterned dresses), are carrying enormous amounts of luggage -- huge cardboard boxes zigzagged with duct tape, and some of the biggest suitcases I have ever seen. The SmartCarte people can dream of second homes tonight; their racks of aluminum carriages are empty, the cash boxes brimming over with quarters thanks to the equatorial-bound Afriquers, who seem to be orchestrating a kind of reverse exodus. It's as though there's been a military coup right here in New York, the KKK has sacked City Hall and the blacks are getting out, throwing everything they have into giant boxes and bolting for the airport.

And what was it that so surprised me when I observed one of the passengers -- a young kid, college-aged, leaning against a lectern and reading a Kafka novel? What is so ingrained in me that I even bothered to notice this -- as if by virtue of nothing greater than his African-ness I should assume this person is an illiterate coconut farmer from Liberia or a drug smuggler?

Recent Stories