Nowhere Left to Go
· by AnyoneButSam
It wasn't the pub this year.
It was Gate 44, twenty past eleven at night, in an international terminal that could have been in any country on earth. Somebody from the old job was getting married in Lisbon and had invited both Ari and Robin, which was either an act of love or an act of war. The flight had been delayed twice. The departure board kept reshuffling the time like a card dealer who didn't want anyone to win.
The gate was packed. Businesspeople with their ties pulled loose. A family with three kids asleep on a heap of coats. Two backpackers comparing tattoos. A cleaner steering a floor polisher in slow, endless circles past a duty-free that sold the same chocolate, the same perfume and the same whisky as every duty-free on the planet.
Robin was typing. Ari was reading over Robin's shoulder.
A photo of the runway at night, blurry lights through glass. The caption: Flying with a heavy heart knowing what this does to our planet. We have to do better. 🌍
Posted. Phone down.
"Don't," Robin said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were loading."
"I was reading. Who's it for?"
"What?"
"The post. Who's it for? Not the planet. The planet doesn't have Instagram."
"It's awareness."
"Aware of what? That planes burn fuel? Name me one adult alive who doesn't know planes burn fuel." Ari sank back into the plastic seat. "You're not raising awareness. You're raising your hand. 'Please, miss, I know, and I feel terrible about it.' That's the whole post. You want the credit for the guilt without paying for the thing. Last year I told you your politics were a church. This is the part of the church that sold indulgences. Pay a coin, knock a hundred days off purgatory. You just paid in posts."
This year, Robin didn't need a warm-up.
"You know what's cheaper than a post? A sneer. At least I'm saying something. You sit there being above it all, every single time. That's a signal too, Ari. The eye-roll is a signal. The 'I'm too clever to care about anything' face is the smuggest virtue signal there is. You just perform it for a different crowd."
Ari looked at Robin for a long second.
"That's good. That's a real hit. You've been practising."
"I've had a year."
"You're right. Contempt is a costume too." Ari shrugged. "The difference is I don't pretend mine is for anyone else. My sneer is for me. Your post says it's for the planet."
Robin opened the app again, like the post needed guarding. Ari kept going.
"You know why a peacock's tail means anything?"
"Oh, here we go."
"Because it's expensive. It's heavy. It's bright. It slows him down and gets him eaten by foxes. The peahen looks at this ridiculous thing and thinks, if he can survive dragging that around, he must be strong. The signal is honest because it costs him something. Biologists have a name for it. Costly signalling. And the rule is simple. A signal that costs nothing tells you nothing." Ari nodded at the screen. "That post didn't cost you a thing. It paid you. Thirty-one likes."
Robin glanced down. Thirty-four.
"So what counts? In the perfect world of Ari."
"Anything that costs. The person who stood up in a meeting, said the true thing and got fired for it, whichever side the true thing was on. The woman on my street who fostered eleven kids over twenty years and never posted one photo of them. The old man who drives his neighbour to chemo every Tuesday. Those are virtues. You'll never see them online, because the people doing them are too busy doing them."
Robin was quiet. Then:
"When I was fifteen, there was one shop in my village with a rainbow sticker in the corner of the window. Tiny. Faded half to nothing by the sun. I bought everything I could from that shop for three years. That sticker was the only thing in the whole village that told me I wasn't the only one." Robin's voice had an edge now. "So don't you dare tell me signals are worthless."
Ari didn't answer straight away.
"I won't," Ari said. "Because that sticker cost something. In that village, in that year, the man who put it there lost customers over it. Probably had a brick through the window at least once. That's a peacock's tail. That's the real thing." A pause. "Now compare it to the bank that turns its logo into a rainbow every June in London and somehow forgets to do it on the accounts for the countries where it would cost them money. Same flag. One of them is a virtue. The other one is a marketing calendar."
Robin opened their mouth, then shut it.
Across the aisle, a man in a gilet with a little national flag patch on his backpack had been listening for a while. He leaned over, pleased with himself.
"It's all these woke companies, innit. Go woke, go broke."
Ari turned. "There's a flag on your backpack."
"So?"
"So what did it cost you? Did you bleed for it? Lose a job over it? No. You bought it at a motorway services for four quid. It's the same thing as the rainbow logo. Different colours. You're a peacock with a Velcro patch."
The man looked down at his own backpack like it had betrayed him. The two backpackers laughed out loud.
Robin muttered "thank you" without meaning to.
"Don't thank me," Ari said. "I'd have said the same thing to you. I just did."
---
The speaker overhead crackled.
Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to inform you that the flight to Lisbon is now expected to depart at one-fifteen. Refreshment vouchers are available at the desk.
Forty people groaned at once in about eleven different languages. It was, somehow, exactly the same groan.
Robin went to the desk and came back with two sandwiches in identical triangular boxes.
"Chicken," Robin said, handing one over. "Or, if you'd prefer, chicken."
Ari turned the box over. The same brand you could buy in any airport from here to Seoul.
"That," Ari said, "is my next point."
"Of course it is."
"Look around. Tell me what country we're in."
Robin looked. The coffee chain. The perfume advert with a model looking disappointed in everyone. The bookshop selling the same ten books as every airport bookshop in the world. A pop song drifting out of the ceiling that everybody knew and nobody had chosen.
"You can't, can you," Ari said. "Blindfold you, fly you to Frankfurt or Dubai or Singapore, take the blindfold off in the terminal, and you'd have to find a sign in the local language to guess. And half of those are in English."
"So airports are boring. Groundbreaking."
"It's not airports. It's everything. When I was a kid in the back of that van, the world was enormous. Every border was a different planet. Different food. Different music. Different ways of being rude, different ways of being kind. And they promised us that if you tear down the walls, the world opens up. That was the word. Horizons. Broaden your horizons." Ari set the sandwich down on the empty seat. "So they tore the walls down. And the horizon didn't spread. It came closer. Because when everything is the same everywhere, there's no 'somewhere else' anymore. The world didn't get bigger. It turned into one room. And the walls of that room are closing in."
Robin came back hard.
"That's nostalgia with a passport. Globalisation pulled a billion people out of poverty. There are kids eating dinner tonight in places where kids starved thirty years ago. You're mourning coffee flavours while they're alive."
"I'm not arguing the economics. More food, fewer dead kids. I'll sign that in blood. I'm talking about what it did to the inside of people."
"I have friends in Lagos. In Seoul. I talk to them every single day. That's a horizon you never had."
"Your friend in Lagos watches the same shows as your friend in Leeds," Ari said. "Uses the same slang. Has the same opinion about the same American election. Fights the same American culture war in the same American words, and gets cancelled by the same American rules." Ari shrugged. "You didn't discover Lagos. Lagos got a copy of you. That's what globalisation actually exported. Not the world to you. You to the world."
Robin's jaw set. And then Robin said the thing.
"You were smuggled across a border in the back of a van. Borders are what kept you in hell. Don't you sit there and romanticise walls. Not you. Of all people."
It was the hardest thing Robin had ever said to Ari across a table. They both knew it. One of the backpackers actually winced.
Ari didn't.
"I'm not romanticising walls. I'm mourning distance. There's a difference. A wall keeps you in. Distance lets you get away." Ari's voice was flat and very steady. "My mother didn't cross that border for a different brand of coffee. She crossed it because on the other side, the thing we were running from couldn't reach us anymore. That was the whole point. There was an away." Ari nodded at the phone in Robin's hand. "The next kid in the back of a van lands, switches that thing on, and it's all still there. The same government reads their messages. The same people send the same threats. The same village finds them in the comments. There's no exile anymore. Exile used to be a mercy. They sold us the end of walls and delivered the end of distance. Now there's just one room, forever, with everybody in it, and everybody watching."
Robin didn't say anything for a while.
A man two seats down in a baseball cap, American by the accent, leaned forward.
"That's exactly it, man. It's the globalists. The elites planned all of this. Davos, the whole thing."
"Nobody planned it," Ari said, without looking at him. "Plans need somebody competent in charge, and I've met the people in charge. Nobody's steering. The flattening isn't a conspiracy. It's just cheaper. It's what happens when everything is for sale to everyone at the same time. You want a villain because a villain would mean somebody could stop it. There's no villain. There's just a price tag."
The man pulled his cap down and went back to his phone.
---
Robin scrolled for a minute, jaw tight, then turned the screen around.
"Fine. Here's one you can't twist."
A clip. A woman on a podcast, leaning into one of those big black microphones.
"I want a man who takes the lead. Who plans the dates. Who's spontaneous, who knows what he wants, who takes care of me. I want to feel safe."
Under it, the comments. This is the standard. Know your worth, queen. Never settle.
"See?" Robin said. "That's healthy. That's someone knowing exactly what they want and not being ashamed of it."
Ari took the phone. Typed. Scrolled. Handed it back.
A different clip. A man on a different podcast, same big black microphone.
"I want a woman who lets me lead. Who lets me plan things. Who trusts me to take care of her."
Under it: Red flag. He wants a servant. This is controlling behaviour. Run, sis.
"Same sentence," Ari said. "Mirror image. She wants a man who leads. He wants a woman who lets him lead. That's the same relationship. Literally the same relationship, described from the two chairs. One of them is a queen who knows her worth. The other one is a red flag."
"It's not the same. When she says it, she's asking for something. When he says it, he's asking for power over someone."
"She's asking for a man to have power over her. She's just asking politely. If his sentence is about power, so is hers."
Robin had an answer ready this time.
"Context changes meaning. 'I'll walk you home' from your friend is kindness. From a stranger at two in the morning, it's a threat. Same four words. And for most of history, a woman who married a man who 'led' couldn't leave. In some countries she couldn't open a bank account without his signature until the seventies. So when a man says 'let me lead,' it carries all of that. It's not about him. It's about the weight on the sentence."
"It carried that weight in 1950," Ari said. "The twenty-two-year-old saying it today didn't build 1950. He wasn't born until long after it ended. You're reading his sentence in his great-grandfather's handwriting."
"Power doesn't disappear just because you weren't born yet."
"Neither does the other half of the deal." Ari tapped the screen. "Watch. She wants a man who takes care of her. That's knowing her worth. He wants a woman who takes care of the home. That's an attack on women's rights. It's the same trade. The exact 1950s arrangement, cut down the middle. One half of it is empowerment, the other half is oppression, and the only difference is which half is talking."
"Because that deal was forced on women."
"And the other half was forced on men. The boy who went down the mine at sixteen and was coughing up blood at forty so the house had heat. He didn't sign up for his half either. Nobody made a poster about him. Nobody gave him a podcast."
Robin put the phone down and rubbed their eyes.
"The principle is simple, Ari. Punch up, not down. Go after the powerful, protect the vulnerable. That's all it is."
"Who decides who's up?"
"It's... obvious. Mostly."
"It's never obvious. That's the whole trick. It's the best loophole ever written. You can hit anyone you like, as hard as you like, as long as you first announce that you're underneath them. So everybody does. Everybody's underneath. The entire internet is a basement full of people punching up at each other. Every group on earth swears it's the one at the bottom, because the bottom is where the permission is."
Ari leaned back.
"It's scripture again. You love scripture, you just don't know it. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. You found a way to turn meekness into a weapon. Step one, prove you're meek. Step two, take the earth."
---
By now half the gate was listening. The businesspeople had stopped pretending to answer emails. The mother of the three sleeping kids had turned her whole body toward them. Even the cleaner had slowed the floor polisher to a crawl.
A young woman with a laptop covered in stickers couldn't hold it anymore.
"Men literally can't experience sexism," she said. "Sexism is prejudice plus power."
Ari turned to her with something like interest.
"Then a man with no power can't be sexist either."
"That's not..."
"The unemployed nineteen-year-old in his mum's back bedroom who spends all night typing hate at women online. He has no power at all. None. By your definition, he's innocent. You just acquitted the worst man on the internet." Ari waited a beat. "Want to rethink the definition, or keep it?"
"That's not what it means."
"It's exactly what it means. That's the problem with definitions built to win arguments. Sooner or later, somebody reads them."
She closed the laptop.
From the other side, a big lad in a tank top with headphones round his neck had been nodding along to everything Ari said, and decided this was his moment.
"Nah, but real talk, women want alpha males, bro. It's biology. Look at wolves."
Ari sighed like a teacher on the last day of term.
"The alpha wolf thing came from studying wolves in captivity. Strangers thrown into a pen together, fighting because they had nowhere to go. The scientist who made it famous spent the next few decades begging everyone to stop repeating it, because in the wild, a wolf pack is just a family. The 'alpha' is mum and dad." A pause. "You've built your entire personality on a zoo."
The gate laughed. Properly. The lad grinned, embarrassed, and put his headphones back on.
"Still, though," he mumbled.
"Still nothing," Ari said.
Robin was looking at Ari differently now. Not softer. Just closer.
"So what do you actually want? Men get to say whatever they like and everyone just nods along?"
"No. I want one rule." Ari held up a single finger. "The same sentence gets the same verdict. Judge the sentence, not the mouth it came out of. If 'I want someone who leads' is fine, it's fine from both chairs. If it's controlling, it's controlling from both chairs. Pick one. I genuinely don't care which. What you can't do is keep one law for the people you like and another law for the people you don't, and still call it ethics."
A pause.
"Every regime I ever lived under had one law for us and another one for them. That's not progressive, Robin. That's the oldest system there is."
Robin was quiet for a long time. The floor polisher hummed. One of the kids on the coats turned over in their sleep.
"I've said the first one," Robin said finally. "On dates. Almost word for word. 'I want someone who takes charge.'"
"I know."
"And I'd have swiped past the second one without finishing the sentence."
"I know."
"How do you know?"
"Because everyone would. That's the point. It isn't you. It's the water. You didn't choose to be wet." Ari picked the sandwich back up and examined it with deep suspicion. "And don't go feeling special about it. I'd swipe past both of them. I don't want to be led and I don't want to lead. I want to be left alone."
---
We are now boarding all rows for the flight to Lisbon.
The whole gate stood up at once and formed the same queue that forms at every gate in every airport in the world. The man with the flag patch ended up right behind the woman with the stickered laptop. Neither of them spoke. The lad in the tank top helped the mother carry one of the sleeping kids down the air bridge, and nobody filmed it, and nobody posted it, and for about ninety seconds it was the most virtuous thing that had happened in the building all night.
Ari noticed. Didn't say anything.
They had the last two seats of row 31. Robin took the aisle. Ari took the window, as always.
The plane climbed. The city fell away underneath them, a spill of orange lights, then roads like veins, then scattered towns, then nothing. Just dark. Huge, unlit dark between one place and the next, the way it used to be.
Ari watched it for a long time.
"Go on, then," Robin said, eyes half closed. "Say something bleak. You've been quiet for ten minutes. It's unnatural."
"The world still looks big from up here."
Robin opened one eye. "Careful. That almost sounded like hope."
"It looks big," Ari said, "because from up here you can't see anybody in it."
Robin laughed so hard the person in front turned round to glare.
Ari pulled the shade down anyway.