"Where is she?"
"She?" I ask, double-checking my luggage and shifting my backpack's weight slightly, sweating lightly under orangish-tinged street lamps on a hot night in late August.
We find ourselves in this moment standing in front of our recently parked car, hopefully scanning for a shuttle that will, if it comes in the next few minutes, allow us plenty of time to get to the airport's campus, through security, and onto our red-eye flight departing Denver for Boston.
"Yeah, I've always thought of this shuttle as having a more feminine energy," my wife (then girlfriend) says.
This parking lot is a known entity, an unwelcome but convenient node in our travel routine. As such I've been there at all kinds of inconvenient hours.
Each time I arrive I encounter the same intrusive thought: this would be the perfect tableau for the beginning of a zombie apocalypse.
Cinematically, admittedly, you could do better. This parking lot sits not far off a six-lane pseudo-highway named Peña Boulevard, surrounded by rental car lots, in a stretch of land that's only technically still Denver thanks to some creative map-making.
An old truism of people arriving in Denver by plane for the first time is confusion: isn't Denver a mountain town? Why are we in the middle of the prairie? Did we accidentally land in Kansas instead?
This is the result of the city of Denver deciding, back in the 1980s, to move the airport from Stapleton, an old field just a few miles from downtown, out to a newly incorporated slice of land twenty-five miles northeast - closer, in fact, to the neighboring city of Aurora than to Denver itself. The idea was that this would give the airport room to expand and let Denver become a bigger hub. In 1995 the move became official with the opening of Denver International Airport. It worked: DIA is now the third-busiest airport in the country, and one of the ten busiest in the world.
What came along with the move was a lot of rumor and speculation, too.
The story goes that you don't relocate a perfectly good airport from inside the proper city limits to the middle of nowhere unless you've got a nefarious, clandestine reason to sell to the powers that be (whomever you believe those are). From the beginning, secret fallout shelters for the wealthy and connected were floated as the real reason, with conspiracy theories pointing fingers at the Illuminati as the obvious organizers. There have also been accusations of ghosts, and claims that several of the murals in the terminal foretell the end of all things.
This is backed up by some truly odd choices that are still on display today.
The main terminal is a set of tents - one of the largest "tensile membrane structures" in the world. Not ominous by itself but a strange enough choice to invite questions. Add this too the first thing to greeting arrivals on the drive in is a thirty-two-foot fiberglass horse, electric blue, reared up on its hind legs, red eyes glowing out at the highway like something summoned rather than sculpted, affectionately called Blucifer. It's said to have killed its own creator - a rumor that happens to be true: a section of the unfinished sculpture broke loose in the artist's studio and severed an artery in his leg. His sons finished the piece. It was installed anyway.
In this set of oddities there isn't, as far as I know, any established legend about zombies, which, standing among the endless rows of dark, parked cars, strikes me as strange.
Who is closer to a zombie already than the airport traveler?
We, as a group, often move seemingly mindlessly in a cloud of undercaffeinated tiredness - groggy from waking up too early or arriving too late, staring blankly into the middle distance as they scan the departure screens or shuffle one space forward in the boarding line.
This parking lot, therefore, feels to me like the perfect place for travelers to finally drop their mask of faux tranquility - to lock eyes on me and, without ever setting down their rolling luggage, begin walking determinedly in my direction, gravely muttering over and over, "brainsssss."
But no undead, or living for that matter, are in the vicinity when I look up and see the headlights of a shuttle taking the left to enter our row in this vast maze of cars.
"Ahh, we're saved."
The shuttle comes silently to a halt, its doors open, and we board. Finding a seat at the back, we begin running through the beats of the next part of our travel in hushed voices, so as not to disturb the sepulchral silence previously established in this muted space by the flight attendant staring blearily into the middle distance and the business traveler looking down at his phone, bluish glow illuminating a blank face, their presence, oddly, enforcing rather than dissolving the feeling that tonight we're alone in this world.
Turning to me she asks “Ok so when we get to Boston how are we getting to the pickup spot for the rental car?"
"We'll take the silver line to South Station and then take a different line to downtown. We'll have about an hour to kill so we'll go find coffee and walk around Faneuil Hall for a bit," I respond.
"Is there going to be anything open that early?”
"Yes, coffee shops are open early - we'll be fine."
"I don't want Dunkin's coffee," she closes.
"Sure," says I.
—
We walk out of the walkway to our gate and enter the quiet and empty portal that is a large airport after hours, and board a red-eye flight full of hushed and sleeping passengers, to arrive groggy and out of sorts several hours later in Boston's Logan airport.
For me there's always a sense arriving on these west-to-east flights that the hours I lose in the time-zone change reset the world in a way that's somehow different from a normal day. That maybe by shortening my own night and being there to observe the transition to dawn, this daily occurrence is now marked as special.
That feeling, though, is quickly assuaged as we continue and encounter those whose daily routine involves seeing and being in this dark golden hour.
The airport reveals that it's not half empty, but that instead it's beginning to wake up. Airline employees, business travelers, people beginning to poke around closed shops and restaurants doing the well-practiced things needed to open them for the day - all are already here, proving we have not discovered anything new, as we wheel our luggage under "Ground Transport ↗" signage.
Stopping for the bathroom, I wait and look out the window at gate 20. The world is beginning to glow orange with the approaching sunrise - strangely the same color as the streetlights in the parking lot we left in Denver, but here spilling out onto a larger, grander canvas.
In front of the window there's a man in his early 50s sleeping, a couple days of stubble on his chin, mouth slightly open, slumped in a row of seats, suit disheveled, holding his briefcase clutched to his chest in a one-armed embrace. Improbably, the other hand holds a white styrofoam coffee, grasped at the top, in a grip reminiscent of the grabber game found at arcades. It's hardly an image that would be used to sell coffee - this man doesn't appear to be affected much by the stimulant nature of the coffee inside. The cup has "Boston" written on the side of it in soft salmon-pink letters, and even from here I can make out the shape of the logo beneath the text. It won't be the last one I see today.
Boston Logan isn't an airport I can navigate with my eyes closed, but having lived in Boston briefly in my early 20s and being from New England, I've had plenty of reasons over the years to fly in and out of this port. It's enough to allow us to navigate the exit of the airport with little enough hassle, but not enough for me to find and present any options for the requested coffee to my girlfriend. Well, except for the ubiquitous Dunkin - there are three visible from where we're standing alone - which I ascertain, after I point and say "ehh?", is met with a firm shake: "no."
Stepping outside of the airport, we look for signs to catch the Silver Line. The world smells different here than the place we left, and how much of that is the thousands of miles we just traversed or the morning dew, I don't have the capacity to fully work out.
The Silver Line is a bit of a beautiful monstrosity of specialty public transportation design - a bus that becomes, briefly, a subway, articulating antennae reaching up to grab power from overhead wires as it slips into a tunnel named for Ted Williams and runs beneath the harbor before surfacing at South Station. I'm sure the pitch for it, years ago, was that it could combine the autonomy of a bus with the gravity of a subway line. Riding it half-asleep at dawn, it mostly just feels like a fittingly strange way to arrive in a city that specializes in being both very old and inexplicably showing off.
Getting from the station to our rental car handoff meant a walk we hadn't quite planned for, through a downtown that hadn't yet decided to be awake. Store windows were dark. Gates were down over doorways. Every few blocks, a Dunkin sat open and lit, the one thing on an otherwise dark block that had already decided the day had started - proof, if nothing else, that whatever we thought we were dodging was going to outlast our resolve. The city had the same feeling as the parking lot back in Denver: full of the shapes of a place, waiting for the people who make it a place to show up. Streetlights still on. A bus idling with nobody on it. It was hard to tell if we'd arrived too early or if Boston simply hadn't gotten the memo that morning had started.
In this quiet, and knowing we had around an hour before the hopeful handoff of the rental car, I decided to fix the problem that was still looming: we had yet to find any acceptable coffee.
We're people who enjoy multiple cups of coffee and treat the getting of it as an activity in itself, which was the real heart of the resistance to just settling for Dunkin. We were newly on vacation - why settle so soon?
I had, after all, gotten coffee many times on this exact route, years earlier, during a short stint living and working in Boston after undergrad. Back then I'd walk from South Station to my office in Post Office Square, a small plaza a stone's throw from our stated destination of Faneuil Hall - one of the most well-trodden tourist spots in the city, a former town meeting hall from the 1700s that still trades heavily on its Revolution-era pedigree, even though today it's mostly a food hall and an open square. But it had been years since I'd taken this route, and I was reliant on my phone to locate any coffee shop that might actually be open.
Getting a bead on one, I diverted our path slightly toward a George Howell Coffee that swore, according to my phone, it was open.
It's an infuriating thing to have one piece of information on your phone directly contradicted by the physical world you're inhabiting. When we reached the location, we were still largely alone on the street, though the hum of traffic had started to feel heavier, some general shifting-about that suggested the world was stirring even if it hadn't fully arrived. From the outside, the shop looked closed - chairs still stacked on tables, presumably left that way by whoever had closed up the night before - but there were staff visible behind the counter, moving with purpose, clearly getting ready for a rush that hadn't shown up yet. No sign told us whether the place was open or closed. More strangely, we couldn't find a door. We circled the block, luggage in tow, faces cupped against the glass like kids at an aquarium tank, watching people who were unmistakably awake and working in a room we apparently weren't allowed into.
We gave up.
As I reached into my pocket to find another option, I had the feeling, for the first time all trip, of being observed by someone. I looked up.
Half a block down, alone on the sidewalk the way we'd been alone on it for the last twenty minutes, was a man - early seventies, maybe older - pushing a small folding wire shopping cart in front of him, its wheels clicking faintly against the pavement in the otherwise strange quiet. He had the look of someone who'd been up for hours already, or maybe never quite went to bed - flat cap, a windbreaker despite the heat, moving with a gait that was sturdy despite the years, bent slightly at the middle but unbothered by it. He was looking directly at us. He kept coming. In a city that had, up to this point, offered us nothing but locked doors and empty sidewalks, he was, as far as I could tell, the only other person awake in Boston.
"Are you two lost?" he says, in a Boston accent thick enough to be a punchline, but with a tone that's friendly, neighborly, the kind of voice that's asked strangers this question a thousand times before and always for the right reasons. He also might have been making fun of us, hard to tell with accents this thick.
"No, we're just - we were hoping to get coffee here. Do you know where the door is?" Admitting to a total stranger that we can't find the door to a coffee shop isn't something I'm eager to volunteer. It's embarrassing to be so thoroughly stumped, but I'm also not one to turn down help when it's offered, so I dive in.
"Ohh, that place isn't open. Doesn't open for another hour," says our helpful stranger.
"Do you know of any other coffee shops around here that might be open?" my girlfriend asks.
"Not a lot open this early." He trails off, a smile growing on his face during a pause that goes on just a beat too long, and then, like something pulled straight out of a commercial, he says it:
"You know, Boston's a Dunkin town, right?"
It's one thing to imagine a scene playing out. It's another to watch someone else's face catch up to the line before they say it - the smile arriving a half-second early, like he already knew how good this was going to sound out loud.
Floored by the sheer, wholesale perfection of this stereotype delivered right on cue, we surrender to whatever gravitational pull draws everyone in this city toward Dunkin eventually, and nod along as he gives us a handful of lefts and a right to the nearest one. We thank him and set off.
Years earlier, SNL had done its own version of this - a parody Dunkin' Donuts ad starring Casey Affleck as the platonic ideal of a regular, all Bruins gear and Boston vowels, narrating a daily routine so specific and so unglamorous that it somehow became the most convincing advertisement the chain never asked for. Standing on that sidewalk, coffee-less and freshly directed toward the nearest one, we felt like we'd wandered into the same sketch.
Arriving at Dunkin, we open the door and are met with a wall of noise and light. Inside it's long and narrow, a couple of tables optimistically placed near the front, empty, functioning mostly as a traffic obstacle on the way to the register. The line seems to include everyone in Boston who is currently, fully, awake, and the people at the front of it are yelling their orders at the cashier like it's the only way to be heard.
Reaching the front, my girlfriend - not a New Englander, and undaunted by any of this - steps up and, too quietly, orders us two drip coffees, no milk, no sugar.
"What was that, honey?" the woman behind the counter yells back, not unkindly.
Her second attempt doesn't go much better - the noise of the room, the order not confidently stated, maybe some unspoken understanding on both sides that Dunkin wasn't my girlfriend's first choice this morning, all conspiring to build a temporary wall between her and completing the order that might as well have been made of steel.
Finally, holding up two fingers, she shouts, "COFFEES. BLACK." That does it. We shuffle left to wait.
As our coffees are poured, the next person steps up - clearly a regular - and rattles off: "Yeah, lemme get two laaage iced caramel lattes - extra drizzle, extra swirl on both. Whole milk. Extra shot in each. Extra whip, and then hit the whip with more drizzle. Light ice. Ohh and two crullers and two Boston kremes."
"Uhh -" I start, and feel a sharp elbow in my side.
"She got all of that but couldn't understand I wanted two plain coffees?" my girlfriend says, exasperated.
"Boston's a Dunkin' town" says I.