A Man, a Plan, a Canal

In the fall of 2013, my short story “A Man, a Plan, a Canal” was published in Commonthought Magazine. As today, 02.02.2020, is a global palindrome day (or something like that) I thought it only fitting to share it here with you. 

A Man, a Plan, a Canal

by Carolyn Clare Givens

Date: December 25, 2008
Time: 0510 hours
Officer Making Report: Kevin N. Ivek
Incident: Confiscation at routine security screening, International Terminal
Reason: Potential weapon
Description of Confiscated Item: Ice pick with wine bottle cork on sharp end.  Stanley brand. 6 ¼  inches long. Clear yellow transparent handle with painted red accents.
Action Taken: Perpetrator questioned and released to board his flight.  Item confiscated.

Officer Kevin N. Ivek finished filling out the form and handed it to the officer behind the confiscations desk, who looked up from thick book with onion-skin pages. The confiscations officer was studying English or something in college, one of those really useful degrees. He had those glasses with thick plastic black frames, which were probably supposed to make him look cool and studious. His uniform shirt was as wrinkled as the pre-creased polyester could get. Kevin watched the confiscations officer look over the form. He had really wanted to write down that the perpetrator was a complete moron who couldn’t comprehend that an ice pick was a potential weapon or that he thought covering the tip of it with a cork from some vineyard in Virginia mitigated the fact that he was trying to get a sharp, pointy object on the plane. Unfortunately there was no place on this form to describe the perpetrator’s idiocy.  That was the responsibility of the officer who’d questioned the guy.

“Ha!” the officer behind the desk barked out a laugh. “With your middle initial your name’s a palindrome.”

“A what?” Kevin asked.

“A palindrome. You know: ‘a man, a plan, a canal, Panama’?”

“Huh?”

“It’s the same backward and forward. A palindrome,” the officer said.

“Oh,” said Kevin.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if the word ‘palindrome’ was a palindrome?”

“I guess so.”

“Like ‘mondegreen.’ ‘Mondegreen’ is a mondegreen.”

“I have no idea what that means,” Kevin said.

“It’s when you hear—”

“And I really don’t care,” Kevin added.

“Oh, sorry.”

“Do you have everything you need?” Kevin asked.

“It’s all here, Officer Ivek,” the confiscations officer said.

Kevin watched the officer toss the ice pick into an open box sitting next to him on the desk. Inside was the night’s collection of a vegetable peeler and t-wrench. Kevin turned his back on the chatty desk officer and walked back toward the screening area. As he passed the customs officer’s lounge, a snatch of conversation caught his ear.

“You’ll never believe who just came through,” a man said.

Kevin stopped to listen. He always stopped to listen, just in case it was her they were talking about. If she ever came through he was sure he’d hear about it.

“Who?” another officer asked.

“This guy just came in on the flight from Ecuador dressed as Santa Claus. Fake beard, red suit, carrying a little plastic Christmas tree in one hand and one of those pop-up electric Coleman lanterns in the other,” the first officer said.

Kevin sighed. It wasn’t her.

“Ecuador? Ugh. I always hate those flights; you always get somebody trying to bring in produce.”

“Yeah, trying to explain to the guy in front of me that he can’t bring in his cucumber and lima beans but the last guy could have two dozen roses…”

“I know!”

Kevin continued on his way, the conversation fading out behind him. He opened a door and passed out into the screening area. One or two passengers were disemboweling their carry-on luggage to get to their computers and quart-sized bags filled with three-ounce-bottles of liquid. Kevin could never understand why people seemed to keep those items at the bottom of their carry-ons when they knew they’d need to pull them out.

Mike Becket on the x-ray machine saw Kevin enter the screening area.

“Hey, Ivek, get back out here! My kids are waiting for me – presents under the tree, you know.”

“Sorry, Mike,” Kevin said. He approached to take over the scanning and told Becket about the talkative confiscations officer.

“Well, I’m off then,” Mike said. “Your turn to break in the new kid.”

Kevin looked up at the kid returning from the entrance to the screening area. His fat, pimply face seemed to be squeezing out of the top of a still-creased blue polyester-cotton mix shirt, the embroidered patch on his shoulder sticking out flat and stiff. “The new kid,” Kevin said.

“He’s not so bad,” Officer Becket said. “And you’ve got a slow morning.” He looked down at the sheet and read off the schedule, a flight departing at eight and one at nine forty.

“See you,” Kevin said. “Merry Christmas.”

Becket left, and Kevin sat back on the stool to wait for the trickle of people who thought you still should show up three hours early for an international flight on Christmas morning. Kevin knew they wouldn’t be busy. He’d have time to think about her, to remember her golden eyes, to bask in her smile.

The new kid stood at attention behind the metal detectors, wand in hand, looking as professional he could with his pimply face and too-small shirt.

“Kid,” Kevin said. “You can relax.  It’s Christmas morning.”

“Yes, officer,” the kid said, not moving.

“Seriously, you’ll pull a muscle.”

“Yes, sir.” The kid spread his feet apart a step and put his arms behind him.

A passenger set his bag on the conveyor belt and Kevin pushed the button to take it through the x-ray. The man stepped through the metal detector, and nothing happened. Kevin saw the outlines of books and a cell phone in his bag. The man’s loafers were neatly placed next to the bag in a bin. The pennies showed up black on Kevin’s screen. He pushed the button and the bag came out on the other end of the machine. The man picked it up and set his shoes down on the floor. Slipping his feet into them, he took a step before turning back.

“Always this empty on Christmas?” he asked.

“Yes,” Kevin answered.

“Hey, you guys got any packaging tape? I’ve got a book with a tear in the cover I wanted to fix. Keep forgetting to pick it up.”

“Kid?” Kevin looked over at the new kid, who was standing at attention once again.

“No sir, just masking tape.”

“Sorry, mister.”

“No problem. Thought I’d ask.”

The man walked toward the gates. Kevin closed his eyes and imagined her walking up to the conveyor belt and taking off her sandals for the security check. He opened his eyes to the sight of the kid’s pimply face. Trying not to shudder, he gave the kid a look. Immediately, the kid flushed from fat neck to hairline and stood at ease.

“Officer Ivek,” the kid said. “Have you worked Christmas morning much?”

“Every year,” Kevin said.

“Really?”

“I request it.”

“Is it always this slow?”

“Has been for seven years.”

Kevin didn’t encourage the kid to talk. He wanted it quiet. He had seven years of Christmas mornings to think about. Seven years. For a moment he wondered if he’d still know her after all this time. He closed his eyes again and the doubt fell away. He didn’t even have to try; her form came before him in an instant: a golden mane of curls falling over her perfectly tanned shoulders, a yellow sundress, the color of a lemon, clinging to her perfect figure, tied round her slim waist with a piece of green twine, her legs tapering to delicate ankles. She was lovely, but it wasn’t until she’d smiled that Kevin’s heart had been caught. She came alive when she smiled, alive in a way that Kevin was sure he’d never been. He’d thought about her every day for seven years, but Christmas mornings were the worst – or maybe the best. Kevin wasn’t sure whether seeing her in his mind’s eye was a torture or a pleasure.

A young family came up to the screening area and began to shed coats and bags into the plastic bins.

“No, Zachey, you can’t carry that through,” the mother was saying to her son. “You have to put your tape measure in the bin.”

The father took the tape measure out of the little boy’s hand and set it on the far side of a bin. The boy started to wail, and his mother tried to comfort him.

“It’s just for a minute, honey! I know, I know, it’s hard to give up your new present even for a minute.”

“Just get through, Celia,” her husband said.

The woman walked through the metal detector as Kevin pushed the button on the conveyor belt.  The boy followed his mother and ran to the edge of the belt for his new toy. He paid no attention as the alarm went off on his father and the new kid began to wand him. The mother handed the boy his tape measure and he began using it on the leg of a table. The new kid finished with the father, and the man gathered his things together and tried to get his wife and son moving toward the gate.

The boy began to scream again when his father picked him up, and Kevin was glad to hear the cries fading into the distance a few moments later. At least their gate was far away. He looked at the table leg the boy had been measuring. It was probably thirty-six inches, Kevin thought. He wondered why there was a plastic footer on it. The janitorial staff must have been proud of their shiny floors.

Kevin closed his eyes again to find her. He looked for her in his mind whenever there were screaming children or disgruntled passengers. She was his refuge.

“So, Officer Ivek,” the new kid said, “you’ve been working TSA for seven years?”

“Yeah,” Kevin said.

“What’s the strangest thing you’ve confiscated?”

Kevin thought about it for a moment. “Candle snuffer,” he said.

“What?”

“It looked like a hammer, so we pulled the bag. Turned out it was pewter candle snuffer.  Probably would have broken if they’d tried to use it as a weapon, but we confiscated it anyway.”

“And why do you always work Christmas mornings?”

Kevin thought about telling the kid to shut up and mind his own fat, pimply business, but decided to answer. “Good money,” he said; then he closed his eyes again and watched her approach his desk as she had that morning.

He’d worked seven years of Christmas mornings just in case she came back. Seven years at security in the international terminal just in case she traveled somewhere else. She’d been going to the Bahamas on that trip. He could remember her destination, her dress, and her smile, but he had no memory of her name.

Kevin opened his eyes and saw Spinelli get up from his stool up at the entrance to the screening area. He walked toward them.

“I’m bored to death up there,” Spinelli said. “Anyone wanna change?”

“I will,” Kevin said. “You can talk to the new kid.”

Getting stuck there with Spinelli would be worse than the new kid. The guy reeked of garlic, even though it was only seven o’clock in the morning. And he’d talk. He always talked. Kevin walked to the desk at the entrance to the screening area. He slipped on the blue gloves and picked up the highlighter and UV light.

A man came through and Kevin took his boarding pass and ID. He glanced it over, looked at the man and initialed it, KI. Between passengers he let his mind wander, imagining everything he’d say to her if she ever came through again. How he’d catch her attention with his wit. Automatically he wrote his initials on the boarding passes, KI, KI, KI, as people came through, but his mind was seven years in the past and a lifetime into the future all at once.

He smelled a light, delicious perfume and automatically reached his hand out for the woman’s boarding pass and ID. Sarah H. Aras, Panama City, Panama, he read.  Then he looked at the picture on the passport and snapped to attention. He lifted his eyes and met hers. Her golden curls surrounded her perfect face and framed a set of honey-colored eyes. She was wearing blue this time, but the light fabric still clung about her slim form like it belonged on her. Then she smiled, and her whole person was suddenly alight. All over again, Kevin felt that he didn’t know what being alive really was, and that he never could know until she was a part of his life. In an instant, seven years of imagined greetings flew through his head. He tried to open his mouth and say something charming, but nothing would come to his tongue. There was a pause as he drank in her presence, then, finally, language came to his lips:

“A man, a plan, a canal—”

“Panama,” she finished for him, laughing a little.

“With your middle initial your name’s a palindrome,” he said.

She smiled. “It is.”

He wanted to tell her that his was, too. Or that he really didn’t care about any of that and wanted to sweep her away to an island in the Pacific with him; that her smile was the light of his life, the thing he’d been hoping to see again for seven years, but the words wouldn’t come.

“Goodbye, Miss Aras,” Kevin said.

“Bye,” she said with another radiant smile. “See you.”

Sarah H. Aras turned away and moved into the screening area, and Kevin N. Ivek watched her go.

“I’ll see you,” he whispered.