High Anxiety

I noticed the small, dark-skinned man with the ill-fitting blue suit as soon as he walked into the area where I was sitting at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. I was reading a newspaper, waiting to board a flight to Los Angeles, when he caught my eye. Rumpled and holding his boarding pass tightly, he had no coffee, no carry-on luggage, no book or magazine.

He seemed nervous. He was jumpy. He stared a lot--first at me, then at a young woman a few seats to my left, then at an even younger woman across from us. For a moment the man just stood there, shifting his eyes from one to the other. He then fixed his gaze on a well-dressed businessman who was so engrossed in his novel that he didn’t seem to notice. The dark-skinned man abruptly sat down next to the businessman, nudged him with his elbow, showed him his boarding pass and spoke to him in a language that I did not recognize.

The startled businessman jerked upright, squeezed an inch or two away from the stranger and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “I don’t know, ask them.” He pointed in the direction of the airline’s gate attendants. As soon as the man got up and walked toward the gate, the four of us, without uttering a word, exchanged a look that said: That was weird. Really weird.

The others went back to what they had been doing--reading, chatting on a cellphone, eating a bite of lunch--before the man in the blue suit appeared. But by then, he had my full attention. I watched him approach the gate attendants, both of whom were helping other passengers. Again, the man seemed oblivious to the concept of personal space. He walked past the line of travelers waiting to be helped, stepped up to the counter and stood shoulder to shoulder with the passenger at the head of the line. It was as if he hadn’t noticed her there.

He shoved his boarding pass into the hand of a gate attendant. She took it from him and nodded her head, pointing first to the gate entrance and then at her watch. She held up 10 fingers as if to indicate that it would be 10 minutes before the flight began boarding. The man turned around and walked back toward me and the others. He sat down next to the businessman, giving him a tad more space this time, and proceeded to fidget and stare at us anew.

I hoped that the strange man had aroused the gate attendant’s suspicion, as he had mine. I was disappointed when he did not. I wanted someone, preferably someone in authority, to take action. I already was grappling with whether I should say something myself--indeed, whether in our post-Sept. 11 world, I had a responsibility. After all, aren’t we supposed to be vigilant, to report any suspicious behavior? Haven’t we been told that doing anything less is forsaking our obligation as good citizens? Wouldn’t only a fool bite her tongue these days?

Still, maybe I was overreacting. Perhaps he was a nervous flyer. Maybe he was just a weary traveler, a foreigner in a country whose language he didn’t speak and whose ways he didn’t fully understand. Maybe he was mentally disturbed--a man who should elicit our compassion, not our distrust.

But what if he was something else: a fanatic with a box-cutter hidden in his suit? A radical in the mold of Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber, who at one point had been detained for suspicious behavior? El Al airlines, among others, closely studies passengers’ demeanor as a way to thwart terrorists, noting that people about to do bad things often act stressed.

Then again, what if I was letting my fears--and, even worse, my prejudices--get the best of me? Would I have felt the same way if he were blond?

When the attendant called for first-class passengers to board, the businessman stood up, grabbed his carry-on bag and took his place in line. The man in the blue suit followed him like a shadow. The businessman later told me that he got so close, it felt like “he was trying to pick my pocket.”

I was still waiting to board, along with the two young women. We exchanged another glance. “Did that guy creep you out, or what?” one of the women asked. We all agreed that he was definitely creepy.

“Should I say something?” I asked them.

They both shrugged their shoulders, unwilling to make a fuss--but perfectly happy for me to do so.

We boarded the flight and I looked to see where the man was seated. Suddenly--I’m still not sure why--I decided to take the plunge. I found the purser and told her that a man on our flight had been acting oddly. I recounted the behaviors that I found disconcerting and told her that several other passengers also seemed alarmed. A flight attendant agreed, telling the purser that when the man boarded, she too thought something about him was off.

I pointed out the man to the purser and took my seat. Minutes later, he was escorted off the plane, leaving me with a strange mix of emotions: simultaneously relieved yet filled with guilt. I asked the purser what would happen to him now. She said the airline would find someone who spoke the language of his native Pakistan and review his itinerary.

After telling the purser about my conflicted feelings, she told me that the decision to remove the passenger was not hers. She had consulted the pilot, and he made the call. She told me that she too had felt torn, and that she had cried when the man was removed from the flight. The other flight attendant was more stoic. “Better safe than sorry,” she said. “If he turns out to be OK, the worse thing that happened to him was [that he was] delayed.”

Perhaps. But assuming he was innocent, he suffered a terrible humiliation. What’s more, he must have been very, very afraid. And fear, I can tell you, is a dreadful thing.