Emotional Threads

It's like a story that hangs in mid-air, pretty much like everyone's lives. I suppose that's what this story is about. This is 'Gatekeeping' by Bryan Washington, published on July 12, 2026 in The New Yorker.

The narrator is a quiet man who works at Houston airport pushing passengers in wheelchairs to their gates. The narrator is kinda dating a Taiwanese flight attendant named JT, but it's an uncommitted relationship floating over two years. JT doesn't seem to mind, and he sees the narrator whenever, meeting in a hotel room. The airport is a transitional space, yet it's regular like clockwork.

He meets different people, and some are regular passengers. He is privy to private details of their lives. He describes these passengers he meets, and in particular, a Carl who always flies to Paris on a Thursday morning every other week. He chats with them. And sometimes they tell him their stories, and give him gems of their life views. 

Sometimes I’m the man in the middle. A white couple I’m assisting to their Berlin flight—the husband’s in the wheelchair—snipe at each other, in hushed voices, for our entire walk to the gate.

You probably left the stove on, the wife says.

The better to burn your son’s house down, the husband says.

Leave your jacket on the security tray, he adds. It’s a rag.

I didn’t want you to feel left out, the wife says.

Don’t bother helping him out of the chair, she adds, to me, as I lead him to the metal detector. Give him something to actually do.

I smile, nodding. I am a rock and a sponge. When we finally make it to the gate, I pass the husband off to a flight attendant, an Indian twink who throws me a knowing look. But the wife stands beside me.

What if I just stay here? she says.

It is a question without an answer. And I don’t know if she wants one. So I loom beside her in silence, until last call sounds and she sighs and boards the flight.

Towards the end of the story, we finally see the narrator inviting JT to dinner at his apartment, about 20 minutes away from the airport. The first visit to his home after two years of a non-committal relationship. 

T repeated his invitation to the narrator to come visit him in Taipei and stay for a month. JT isn't going to be flying for a few months anymore, and he wouldn't able to see the narrator unless the latter goes to Taipei. The readers are left hanging about this invitation since the narrator didn't offer insights about whether he agreed.

We see the narrator back in his job, and talking loads to Carl. Is it the journeying that truly matters? Or the final decisions? The real steps taken instead of having ideas swirl in one's head? In an interview with the same journal, the author noted a hefty weigh of personal obligations and choices of being emotionally distant versus actively finding a community. My head hurts simply thinking about it. That's complicated. 

The potential reward of community can outweigh the risk of failure. And to what extent that reaching, even if only very occasionally fruitful, justifies the work of creating conditions for gentleness. The reaching and flailing toward possibility is the narrative. While I was drafting, it was important to me that every character in this story had space for complication, while still making the choice to strive for motion. They choose to actively reconfigure their language and actions to live among one another as best they know how.