Dead Luggage
Dead Luggage
I work in the dead luggage warehouse at an airport. It's where unclaimed luggage goes to die. Some people forget they packed two suitcases instead of one, some people get arrested when they arrive in an airport, some people die onboard a flight, and some people simply opt out of claiming what's theirs. All of this luggage comes to the dead luggage warehouse.
People forgetting leaving their luggage behind willingly or unwillingly isn't the only reason luggage shows up here. Sometimes, luggage looses its tags and ends up in limbo between planes. Sometimes, it's sent on the wrong flight and never quite makes it back onto a plane to get back to its owner. There are so many factors. So many things that land a suitcase here.
Every dead luggage warehouse operates differently. Some hold auctions once a year, letting people buy random, unopened suitcases after they've held on to them the legally required amount of time. Other donate the contents of those suitcases to charity. And then there's those like my warehouse. The laws in my state are stricter. We can't sell or donate what we have here. So at the end of a ten year waiting period, we take it to the dumpster.
Ten years sounds like a long time, but you would be surprised how many people come knocking at our doors after six or seven years. They've been trying to track down a single suitcase, lost on a specific date. It has something inside of it. They're grandmother's ashes. The camera with their wedding pictures. A priceless family heirloom. Something worth hunting for all these years. You can always tell which people come here to find something so personal and irreplaceable. They check the luggage that was lost around the same time as theirs, very carefully. Even looking inside of some of the bags that match the size and color of what they lost, just in case they forgot its exact appearance.
Sometimes, they find what they're looking for. There's tears and celebration and endless gratitude that we held on to their bag for so long. Those moments always feel good. They make me feel like the guardian of a treasure room. Then there are the less honorable people that show up at the warehouse, looking for something that's theirs.
Those people don't like answering questions. They ask that you don't help them. Just point them in the direction of the bags that were lost around that time. They aren't usually drug dealers, the dogs usually sniff those bags out. But there are arms dealers and people with kiddy porn on the hard drive, packed between socks and wrapped in a sweater. People with stolen goods and all kinds of other unsavory material.
With enough experience, you get a feel for them when they come in. They pretend their polite, saying please and thank you, making small talk when they arrive, but they give you the vibe and are real standoffish when it comes to helping them find what their looking for.
As soon as I get the vibe from one of those people and they give me the "I can look by myself" line with their excuse of the day as to why I should make myself scarce, I wish them the best of luck and go back into my office. There I call the small police station that's built into our airport to have someone stop over and do a bag check when this person tries to leave.
The airport police always comes immediately. In my time as manager, I have helped arrest four pedophiles, one arms dealer, and five people importing various items that they shouldn't be bringing back to the US with them, including the skull of a child. It's always surprising to these people that the cops come in when they're trying to carry their bag out. Not realizing that there is a simple procedure the airport uses in these cases to ensure arrests.
If you find your bag, you have to bring it to the large table in the front of the warehouse. You then have to sign for it. In order to sign for it, you have to open the bag and check the contents. That way, you can't deny later that this bag isn't yours.
I always make friendly small talk with these people while they are claiming their bags. Joking about how relieved they must be after finding it all these years later. Asking them how long it's been and where they were traveling when they lost it. It's not a conversation that arouses any suspicion. In fact, it's the same conversation I have with everyone who finds their bag, but with the criminals about to get busted, it's a little more meaningful. I make notes of what they say and testify to it in court later if the police need me too.
Once they've signed for their bag and are walking to the door, the police walk in. They've been waiting outside, peeking through a window to see how the claiming of the bag is progressing. Then, once they see that the person has sign the paperwork and is walking out of the door, they swoop in and do a proper bag search.
Sometimes they bring the person back to the table in the warehouse. If the person tries to run, they bring them directly to the small police station. There is a clause in the paperwork these people sign that says the police have permission to search the bag they claim in case of suspicious behavior. Max was the person who came up with that clause which was then written by a pack of airport lawyers to ensure it was legal. Max was the warehouse manager before me. When I started twelve years ago, Max was in charge. He taught me everything. How to sort the bags in a way that you could always find a bag lost on a certain day and year within five minutes. He taught me how to drive the forklift we rarely used.
With the modernization of airports, fewer and fewer bags were landing in the warehouse. There used to be crates full of bags stacked on high shelves throughout the whole warehouse when I started. Now the shelves had been taken down and brought to another warehouse to be used there. It was about six years after I started my job that the shelves started disappearing. The modern luggage transport system had come in to most airports at that time, but the old bags that were lost in much larger quantities still had to wait their required ten years.
Our routine was a simple one. Every day, we accepted the incoming batch of dead luggage. Luggage that had already made its way through various in-airport holding or storage rooms waiting for someone to claim it here or for someone far away to send an inquiry asking if we had found that particular bag. The staff, in airport, marked when the bag first arrived and what steps they had taken to try and contact the rightful owner. They wrote down which flight the bag had come in on and why the owner couldn't be identified or why they thought the bag had been abandoned. The forms were attached in a plastic sleeve to the bags.
Then, they shipped it to us. Before storing a bag, we double checked to see if we could find a name or contact information on the bag that the airport staff had missed. Once in a blue moon, we did. We would contact the owner and then fill out a form, stick a new form to the bag, and send it back to the airport so that it can either be put on a flight to where it needs to go or the owner can walk through the doors and claim it themselves.
Max always said that love or fear brought people all this way to claim their bag. Love brought people here to reclaim something meaningful. Whether it was their vacation pictures or the clothing of a child that had died on the ride home from the airport. Love brought people here to reclaim pieces of their hearts.
Fear brought people here to avoid arrest. In their minds, the bag they lost, that harbored their evil deeds and sins, had some undeniable evidence that could be traced back to them should the bag ever be opened. These people fought against the clock in their head, thinking that any moment now the police would find them if they didn't find the bag first. Little did they know that in most cases, if they simply had let the bag wait out the ten years, nothing would have happened. All of our bags went to the dump. If they were unclaimed, they went to the dump unopened.
Or at least that's what we were doing officially. The bags that were brought to the dump were supposed to go there unopened in case the owner came looking for them after the ten year marker. That never happened though. Max worked at the warehouse for thirty years and that never happened. Even in my time here, I never had anyone even ask about a bag that went to the dump. So when I had been at the warehouse for a year and a half, Max decided to take me on a dump run with him. We helped the other workers load that weeks worth of ten year bags into a large van. Then we drove. The dump wasn't too far from the airport. No one likes living with airplanes landing nearby and no one likes living near a dump, so our city had the good sense of putting the two virtually next to each other.
However, when we were driving to the dump, Max took an unexpected turn onto another road. We drove for about twenty minutes into the city. There, we stopped in a church parking lot. Max pulled up next to the clothing donation box. He opened one suitcase after another and started pulling all of the clothing out, regardless if it was old or new. High fashion or discount store.
All of the clothing went into the donation box.
"It may be out of fashion," Max told me. "But this way it can be worn by someone who needs it. It's such a stupid waste to take it to the dump just because some lawyer has his panties in a bunch that someone might sue us if they don't find a full suitcase in the trash."
Max also put any cash, jewelry, or watches he found to the side. I thought that donating the clothing was his way of easing his conscience while stealing the valuables. I was wrong. Once all of the suitcases were virtually empty with their clothing gone, Max stacked them back in the van, locked the van, and went into the church. I followed. There Max walked to the donation box where people lit prayer candles and dropped everything inside. He didn't even keep a single dollar for himself.
"They run a home," he said. "For women who got beat and their kids. It's not much and its not every week that I get lucky, but when I do, I know it does them a lot of good to get that little extra bit of cash."
Max and I continued doing the Friday runs to the dump together. I helped him empty the suitcases and sorted items with him. In every bunch of suitcases there was always one or two that was full of what Max called Undonatables. One bag full of sex toys. Another bag full of strange Japanese crackers. One full of plastic wrap. Things like that. Those bags we just loaded up into the van again and laugh about what the owner of the Undonatables was like.
Two years after I started, Max retired. He made sure I took his place as manager. Most people only worked in the warehouse for a year or so. Young men saving up the decent pay working in the warehouse gave them. Most of them used the money to go to school.
Since I lasted a year and a half, Max let me in on his secret. Then, when I lasted two, I was the most senior warehouse worker under Max. We were good friends. He came to my wedding and I went to dinner at his house and met his wife.
When Max retired, he took his wife and sailboat out into the world. It was about three years later when they vanished off of the face of the world. There was an article in the news about them. A picture of the smiling pair assumed to be lost at sea. Drowned in a storm.
I thought about Max when I continued the secret donations at the church. I remembered the last time I'd seen him in the warehouse, carrying a large purple suitcase to the batch of new arrivals after we'd said our goodbyes. A moment, I had nearly forgotten amongst so many others until the ten year marker came. A reminder that it had been ten years since Max had set foot in this warehouse. I was loading the large purple suitcase into the van when the image of Max rolling this case through the warehouse came back to me.
It made me smile as I drove the donations to the church that day, thinking that Max's tradition of charity had continued on for a decade after he retired. When I left, I would be sure to do the same. Find a good, honest person to be my replacement. Teach them the charity of our ways.
I was half way through unloading the clothing from the suitcases when I came to the purple one Max had carried. I wondered, as I unzipped it, would it be full of clothes and useful things or a funny bag of Undonatables. As I was about to open the bag, I realized that I was hoping for Undonatables. It would have been something Max would have gotten a good laugh out of. That the last heavy bag he lugged through the warehouse was full of some nonsense. Large dildos or a thousand plastic spiders.
Then, when I lifted the top, I noticed something peculiar. There was a name written on the inside of the top of the suitcase. Joanne Warner. Max's wife. Had Max not recognized his own wife's suitcase? Was this some strange twist of fate that someone just happened to have the same name as her and lost the last bag I saw Max carry? Or had Max been clever enough to plan a prank a decade in advance?
Slowly, I looked into the suitcase. It was full of plastic wrap covering something else. I lifted the plastic and the smell hit me hard. It was Joanne. Max wasn't the good person I thought he was after all and I started to wonder if his ship had really been lost at sea.