Rod Serling was constantly making reference to a Fifth
Dimension, “Beyond that which is known to man.” He loved to say that it was a
dimension, “…of sight and of sound,” but I would like to disagree with the
title of this dimension. That’s right, Serling had it wrong, it’s not the
“Twlight Zone,” it’s the “Perspective Zone.” I am speaking, of course, of a
unique place that only a privileged few have the opportunity to visit during
their lifetimes. The Perspective Zone is a place where everything you think and
know is challenged, where your reality is flipped on to its head and you have
no other option but to come to some realistic and undeniable conclusions.
Shall
I open with a true Serlingesque statement? I think it is the only appropriate
option here, really. Take, if you will, the following scenario of a man lost in
an unknown land, he is a man who, for all intents and purposes, we will call
Joe Blow. The last thing Joe remembers is having fallen asleep on American
Airlines flight number 342, bound for HOU. When Joe wakes up, the plane has
already come to a complete stop at the gate, the “fasten seat belt” sign has
been turned off and people are standing up to open the overhead compartments
and remove their carry-on luggage. Joe gathers up his own personal items and
proceeds to head up the aisle, onto the connecting bridge and emerges into an
airport terminal that he does not recognize at all. Thus enters Joe into the
Perspective Zone.
He
has been to the Houston airport several times on business trips, this is not
it. The first thing he notices is that everyone looks different from him; they
all have dark skin, dark hair and are petit. His first thought is to sort out
what has happened with the information desk, but, as he has never been to this
airport, he has no clue where the information desk is. He decides to ask
someone. He walks up to the first person he sees, a middle-aged looking woman
of short stature, glasses and dark curly hair, and he asks her if she has any
idea where the information desk is, “Señor, no le entiendo nada, ¿habla
español?” Joe becomes frustrated and tries, with no avail, to speak to the
woman both louder and slower. As he walks away from the shocked woman who is
now standing with her mouth open and a very confused look on her face, he
thinks to himself, “Here we are in the U.S. and people can’t even speak
English.” The woman was
thinking, in contrast, “Aquí tenemos un tipo que viene hasta Ecuador y no habla
ni una palabra de español, ¿y ahora?” It is not after Joe
tries to communicate with three other people, a young lady on a cell phone, an
old man with a dog and an angry gentleman with a cigar, that he realizes that
no one in the airport speaks English. He resolves to find the information desk
on his own.
As
it turns out, the desk was not all that hard to find, the airport seemed
relatively small and Joe only had to follow the natural flow that all modern
airports seem to possess (if you’ve been in one, you’ve been in most). He
walked to the end of a long corridor, through a security check point, out into
the luggage claim area and up some stairs to the pick-up area. It was there
that he found a pretty and very bored looking, twenty-something, woman, seated
at a desk below a big hanging question mark, twirling her hair with one hand
and leaning her face on the other. The first thing that he said when he came to
the desk was, “English?” With an accent that Joe really didn’t recognize, she
replied, “Yes sir, how caan I heelp you?” Joe was certainly relieved to finally
find someone who understood him, but he couldn’t contain the rest of his
anxiety, “Where the hell am I?”
After
a lot of convincing and reassuring on the part of the pretty and board woman,
Joe came to terms with the fact that he was now in Ecuador, South America. Once
he was directed to the American Airlines counter, he sorted out that, somehow,
he was boarded on the wrong plane. “I giive you my moost siinceerest apologies,
Miister Blow,” Joe was informed by a not so pretty, balding, man that he would
need to stay the night at a nearby hotel, as there were no remaining return
flights to Houston that night. The happy man finished up with his sincere
apologies and by saying, “We do haave some good neews, fors you seer, your
luggage diid make iit to Houstone!” They provided Joe with the address to the
hotel and sent him on his way.
He
had already had quite enough perspective, but Joe really had no idea what kind
of night he was in store for. As he had no bags, he made directly for the
airport exit, but was stopped by a little girl before he reached the automatic
doors. The girl was the epitome of sadness, her face, hair and hands were
dirty, she looked as if she were about to cry and she carried with her a bucket
that was just as big as her. Joe really couldn’t figure what was in the bucket
until the girl extracted a red flower from it, which was wrapped in plastic and
she held it out to him saying, “¿rosa? He assumed that this meant “rose”, but
he really had no need for a rose. The girl followed him all the way to the
taxis saying, “rosa señor, rosa,” and, by the time he was getting into the car,
she was screaming, crying and making an altogether scandal.
Things
didn’t improve much with the taxi driver. The man spoke no English beyond,
“Hello my friind.” He resorted to trying to say the name of the hotel as best
he could and he showed him the paper it was written down on. An hour later,
after what seemed to be more of a circuit than a straight trip, the taxi driver
promptly charged Joe double what they told him the trip should cost in the
airport. He shut the door, accidentally a bit hard, and the driver drove off
shouting at him what he assumed were profanities in Spanish.
The
rest of his night was rather similar, full of confusions, mistranslations, and
misunderstandings. The thing that most impacted Joe, however, was the way he
was looked at and the way he felt. The reality was that he found himself in a foreign
country; he was taller than everyone, white and didn’t speak the language. From
the airport, to the hotel and while he was out for dinner, he noticed people
looked at him quite a bit, they almost studied. Not being used to gaining this
kind of attention, Joe felt rather uneasy. Every place and thing was new and
different, the constructions were nothing like what he was used to, the cars
strange and foreign and the order/rules appeared to him unclear or nonexistent.
When
he had finished his meal (a plate he turned out not to enjoy at all because he
had no idea what he had actually ordered), he tried to ask around to find out
what the best way to get back to the hotel was, no luck. He felt that the taxi
ride from his hotel to the restaurant was pretty short and he thought that he
wouldn’t have much trouble finding his way back on foot. It turns out he was
wrong about his assumption. He walked around for about an hour, found himself
seriously lost and began to become a bit nervous. The hour he spent getting
lost was full of hard stares from the people he walked by on the streets,
asking people for help that couldn’t understand him and passing dozens of
street corners that all looked the same. He made a turn down one street and
found himself walking toward a group of five teenagers that he perceived as
menacing. He began to walk fast and try to avoid eye contact, but he was
stopped.
Joe
began to freak out, but one of the boys asked him, in a perfectly understandable
English, “Are you lost sir?” Joe explained to the boys that he had gotten lost
trying to find his way back to his hotel and asked them if they had any idea
how to get there. Not only did they tell Joe where his apartment was, they actually
walked with him back. Joe thanked them all and webt up to his hotel room. The
next morning, Joe made his way back to the airport and, relieved to be going
home, boarded his plane to Houston.
