I spoke with a white man at the Miami airport. We were in the gate area together waiting to board a plane for Seattle. He was seated in a row of chairs opposite from where HW and I were seated. Slouched in his seat, possibly weary from travel, he had a calm demeanor. Probably in his 70s, his face was splotched with sunburn. Our eyes met. Where you been, he asked. The Galapagos Islands, I beamed. HW and I had returned to the states two days earlier, but I was still in a dream-like headspace, all pain surrendered, as one feels during the waning half lives of a narcotic. And so as a way to share my surplus of lightness of being, and to offset the ennui of airport layovers, I winked at the man, smiled, and added, you know, to confirm that Darwin was right. The man wore a t-shirt sporting an ad for a beach-side bar in Puerto Rico. His travel companion was wearing the same t-shirt but in a different color. She was a black woman, nestled in her seat and pressed against the chair arm that separated them. Her bangs didn’t move when she raised her head slightly to regard me with a kind of stern look, which, all I could think in the moment, may have been triggered by her hearing the word Darwin. Naturally, I assumed they might have been to Puerto Rico recently, and perhaps like HW and I, were on their way back home. Of course we now know he wasn’t right, the man said. His companion shot him an approving look, then looked back at me and smirked. No, I don’t know that, I said, returning his volley. I felt HW stir next to me. His companion squirmed uncomfortably in her seat and glared at me with mercurial eyes. Right away, a convenient set of assumptions about me seemed to occur to him. He looked at me pointedly, chuckled dismissively, and said, well, where did we come from do you suppose? We? You mean like me and you? Yes, Man, where did Man come from, he insisted. Oh boy, we got a live one. Just then HW piped up, shot him a glance and said, you got him going now! From a distant ancestor, something resembling but not the same as modern apes, I said. At this his companion curtly shook her head no, her eyes still fixed on me. Then, like an insatiable child… and where did the ape-like things come from, he said. Gee, I don’t remember, Lemurs maybe… you know there’s something called the evolutionary tree. You can trace life back to the first amoeba or whatever. Sure, he said, and where did the first cell come from. Ultimately, from a self-replicating molecule, I said. His companion continued to shake her head no, the immovable bangs glistening under the natural light beaming through the tall windows behind her. Yes, I said, molecules that catalyze their own reproduction, it’s called the RNA-world hypothesis. You ever hear of Lee Ross, he said. Who? Wait, he’s a crackpot, isn’t he, I said. Maybe I have. He leaned back hard in his seat, as if to retreat from his conviction. Well, I’m no scientist, he said, but Lee Ross is an astrophysicist, and he says there is no way life could have evolved from no life. You could look him up. I am a scientist, I said. It’s a straightforward lab experiment to show that certain molecules self-catalyze their own reproduction. People around us began to listen in. Couldn’t I put the same question to you, I said, where did God come from, if that’s who you suppose created life? He paused and looked at me, as if to concede I may have had a point, but I couldn’t say for sure, and with that his countenance changed, like me he appeared to acknowledge how preposterous it was that two strangers in an airport should be discussing the greatest mystery in the universe, and leaving it unanswered, in an exchange that couldn’t have taken more than sixty seconds. Then the call came for early boarding and the man stood up and helped his companion into a wheelchair. A few minutes passed and I spotted her in line, the man standing behind her with his hands on the handles of her chair awaiting the gate agent to scan their boarding passes, still staring at me, warily.