Manchester and London were delayed on account of weather, and Tel Aviv was a faulty wing flap. Tenerife, Johannesburg, Málaga and Marrakech had been canceled for various reasons, and stragglers from those flights were trying to figure out their next move on this humid night at the end of May. Some were arguing with the airlines; some were studying the ever shuffling flight board; some were headed off to nearby hotels, parched and ready for cold gin-and-tonics to ease the dull throb of their long day. A few scanned the terminal mournfully, searching for the right bench or piece of floor to camp for the night. Later it would make a good story: the purgatorial night spent in Terminal One at Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Meanwhile, the flight to Libreville, which was to leave in two hours, had brought a raucous horde to the Air Gabon counter, the women dressed in colorful gowns, a cacophony of clipped tribal dialects punching holes in the fabric of the terminal's white noise. The group, maybe 200 in all, had materialized suddenly, as if by incantation, and would just as quickly vanish in the night, in the silver gut of a 747 roaring southward over desert and veld for home. Like everyone in this place, they were apparitions, part of the incessant tide that rushed, then ebbed, that filled and emptied, filled and emptied—at moments leaving the airport a lonely beachhead, one that bore no trace of those who had just been there.

As the hour grew late, the terminal took on a nocturnal malevolence. To be inside this place was not unlike being inside the belly of a dying thing. Upon its completion in 1974, Terminal One had been hailed as a triumph, an architectural breakthrough built by Paul Andreu, who had proclaimed that he wanted the airport "to project the image of Paris and France as one of equality, and prowess in engineering and commerce." It appeared as a gray doughnut-shaped flying saucer—outer space brought to earth—with a burbling fountain at its open-air center. But over the years the fountain had fallen into disrepair and the water was shut off, revealing, behind its vapory skeins, a wreckage of rusted pipes and a cement shed, the inevitable artifacts of the future disintegrating, then becoming the past.

The whole world passed through this place, on the way to Paris, or from Paris, or simply using Paris to leapfrog to the next time zone. Disembodied voices called passengers to their gates, where they were delivered heavenward. Soccer teams and school bands tromped through, as did groups of old people wearing the same T-shirts or church groups wearing the same baseball caps. They sat reading or photographing each other. They went for coffee or hamburgers. They wheeled by in wheelchairs. And then they were gone.

The longer you hung around in Terminal One, the more mundane everything became. Had a herd of red on been unloaded from Jerba and wandered out of customs, it would not have been such a surprise. Had a planeload of mimes come from Nuremberg, they would have registered only as part of the passing circus, hardly remembered afterward. In this context, a great deal made more sense here than elsewhere, including perhaps Sir Alfred.

A friend told me about Alfred a few years ago, having heard of him on the Internet. Initially, she believed him to be a work of fiction: the man who had waited at Charles de Gaulle Airport for fifteen years, on the longest layover in history. But then, the man was real. It was said he could be found near the Paris Bye Bye bar. He'd be bald on top, with frizzes of wild hair on the sides and four teeth missing, smoking a gold pipe, writing in his journal or listening to the radio. It was said, too, that it really didn't matter what time of day or night or which day of the week one visited, for Alfred was always there—and had been since 1988.