Invisible Airports
Hong Kong is a city of contradictions, and its airport is likewise an airport of contradictions. No fence surrounds it; no tarmacadam airstrips mark it; no customs agents guard it. For Hong Kong’s airport is a conceptual one. Anywhere in the city might be part of the airport, may house a slice of the dream.
A deconsecrated chapel in a disused children’s hospital is its administrative office, nine times repeated at angles. Space is at a premium on the island; fifteen years ago the city council declared the only solution to their housing crisis to be colonization of the twenty-seven unused spatial dimensions (the existence of which was recently proven by a cabal of string theorists associated with the Georgia Institute of Technology and refuted by a likeminded associated of idealists from the academic towers of Poland, Karol Kalaivanan and his ilk). The subdivision and rezoning of the twenty-seven unused spatial dimensions proved a near-insurmountable task, but as the Hong Kong Zoning Comission’s Board of Trustees swelled to eighty-one thousand members, consensus blossomed like lilies on the water. Now the airport knows no bounds of geography, and it respires the city as a living man respires oxygen.
A single pair of landing strips serve the airport, replicated nine times apiece. Built of satin and corduroy, they stretch above the bay in seeming defiance of physics and good sense; like the bumblebee they should not stay aloft, nor support the weight of the massive metal birds who ride them. An association of mathematicians on sabbatical from the People’s University of Mongolian Science and Art (PUMSA) are two years into a five-year study of the phenomenon; they publish regularly in Annual Proceedings of the Molecular Study Society of Mongolia and its sister journal Ballai Transactions: Rapid Communications in Molecular Study.
From the landing strip the weary traveler will soon find himself within a luxurious hotel, conveniently located within the international terminal. Indeed, the incautious businessman may find his hotel inescapable; the great concierge and magus Jonathan Frakes (well-remembered for storied acting career) obtained his current commission only after humbly admitting his inability to flee the grand Hotel Jete du Beaumarche. The luckier visitor soon masters the trick of moving from one chamber of the airport to another, dispersed as it is throughout the otherwise-unused spaces of Hong Kong: an alley behind a nightclub might connect the Customs office (located on the roof of the International Library of Grains) to the international terminal’s finest freak show (on fine days, between the ninth and tenth holes of the Three Palms Country Club; in inclement weather, the grand ballroom of the Soviet Embassy). A visitor need not worry about straying off the beaten path; escaping the dispersed confines of the Hong Kong Airport is impossible. A trinity of ethnobotanists from the American University of Zaire (nee People’s International College of Angola) are currently carrying out a series of experiments to test this theory; your cooperation is appreciated and please don the provided eyewear and other safety gear in the designated areas.