In “Gatekeeping,” your story in this week’s issue, a man works at an airport, pushing people in wheelchairs to their gates. He’s also seeing a flight attendant, but can’t quite commit to a relationship. In the airport, a liminal kind of place, he’s sort of drifting through his life. Why did you give the narrator this occupation—what narrative possibilities did it open up for you?A recurring theme in my work is journeying: characters going to, or coming from, some other place. The ways in which physical and liminal distances shift an individual’s sense of self work their way in, too. But, here, it felt interesting to center a protagonist at the site of other characters’ journeys while his own plays out in comparatively stationary circumstances. This framing also posed a challenge: How could