“It’s an unresponsive yo-yo,” I explained. “It’s not supposed to come back straight away. It’s so you can do tricks and stuff. The sound is the bearing—it needs oiling.” I felt like this was inadequate, not just as a story for airport security but also as an ontological position. “Sorry.”

The security guard stared for a moment and then seemed to make a decision. He smiled suddenly and broadly. “Can you show me?” he said, glancing briefly from side to side as though he was being naughty. He was smiling with the eagerness of an excited child. I noticed he was carrying a gun.

“Err, sure,” I answered, whipping the string into a loop that tripled the amount wrapped around the axel, causing the silicone response-pads to bite and the sleeping yo-yo to snap back into my hand with a satisfying smack.

“Cool,” he said, grinning enthusiastically.

I realized that he’d never seen anyone use a modern yo-yo before, so even a basic "bind" like that opened a whole new world for him. Happy that the yo-yo’s objective charm seemed to have come to my rescue once again, I threw my little Basilisk into a strong "breakaway" to the side. It flew over my left index finger and then my whole right hand before dropping it into a "wrist mount." Then I popped it back out through the V, caught it into a "trapeze," flipped it round into a "side mount," and then jumped it into an "air bind" that brought it slamming back into my hand.

“No way!” he said, spacing out the words for extra emphasis and staring with something approaching awe on his face. He was a child who’d just added a toy to his Christmas list.

It’s easy to forget how much of an impression such a simple object can make on people. The yo-yo has been charming and enchanting people for centuries, even when it simply moved up and down a string as a predictable instance of rotational physics and gyroscopic stability. Anyone can pick up a fixed-axel yo-yo and bounce it around; the therapeutic value of this repetitive action is well documented, and the amount of skill required is minimal. It gives people a particular kind of thrill to feel in control of such a dynamic, energetic, and animated object. But the modern yo-yo is a different proposition: If you haven’t developed a basic level of skill, the yo-yo doesn’t even return to your hand—it just spins in its sleeping position until its sleep becomes a slow death. You need to play with a modern yo-yo. It participates like an animated companion. It collaborates, cooperates, and, also, resists. It seems to act. You have to coax it or force it or trick it. In return for this investment, it is transformed into an instrument of creative expression: The modern era of yo-yo championships (which was kickstarted in Chico, California, in 1993) is now dominated by creative, freestyle performances of astonishing intricacy and skill; there are styles of play that require the use of two yo-yos at once, styles in which the string isn’t tied to the player’s finger at all, and styles in which the string isn’t even attached to the yo-yo. The expressive possibilities enabled by this simple, circular toy are immense. The yo-yo has become an instrument of urban expression, like hip-hop, graffiti, and skateboarding.