The Flight

A misanthrope gets on an airplane.

He didn’t want to sit and wait for the plane. He wanted a cigarette. But LAX sadly lacked the grace and good sense to accommodate America’s smoking populace. It was hard to find a place to smoke anywhere in this stupid state.

The airport was crowded. Some half-forgotten lady crooner murmured a perennial standard about sleigh rides over the loudspeaker. An older couple, both blind, sat to his right, a few seats down. A million and three other people stood, sat, and sprawled in various configurations all over the last few terminals here on this side of the airport. He really wanted a cigarette.

There’s always that feeling in large crowds that you’re about to see someone you know. Everybody looks like that guy from your old math class, but a little taller, or fatter, or with slightly different glasses. There’s actually only thirty or forty different faces a person can have; everybody’s a variation on one of them. Isn’t that the guy I used to work with, back at that bar? Hey, it’s that girl from my economics class! But they never were.

His eyes followed the swaying hips of a fetching fellow traveler as he sat, chin on fist, his noise-canceling headphones canceling all the outside noise except for the people and the continuous droning announcements about death and disaster. He really wanted a cigarette.

It was a long way back home. It’d been a long way out here, too. Longer then, come to think of it. At least this time he was flying back to his cozy East Coast filial home. Coming out here, he’d gone by bus. Bus. Can’t smoke on a bus either, though he’d had the girl to keep him comfortable, and to help relieve tension at a series of cheap motels and hostels across America. And where was she now? Nowhere within tension-relieving distance, that was for sure.

Nor would she probably have been in the mood even if she had been nearby. It’d been a nasty break, full of drunken escapades and hours-long expulsions of grotesque amalgams of ‘feelings’ he shivered even to contemplate. His therapist had said he’d have to face that stuff if he was ever going to go back to being a healthy and normal member of society. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go back to being a normal member of society. He’d been a normal member of society when he left home to come out to this palm-grovéd and glib paradise. Maybe that’s just what California did to people.

His heart skipped a beat as he thought he saw a girl he knew, glanced at an armed policeman fingering his firearm, and at that same moment was bombarded with more announcements at frequencies specifically designed to penetrate noise-canceling headphones. He Googled the headphone manufacturer’s website to see if he could find a customer service number and unload a little derision on whoever happened to pick up the phone. But he was asked to continue holding and assured of his value until he hung up and sank back into his chair. A text message arrived to inform him that it had cost roughly fifty cents to use the airport’s WiFi to look up the manufacturer’s website.

“If any unknown person attempts to give you any item, or asks you to take anything on board, do not accept it, and notify the nearest Transportation Security officer immediately. Never leave your luggage unattended.” He looked around for a suspicious character whose belongings he could offer to carry, but everybody nearby looked more or less clean-cut and red-blooded. Oh well.

After three hours, he heard some numbers that sounded familiar, and the name of the city he was trying to get to. He stood, collected his things, made sure his wallet and ticket were handy, and went to stand in line. He walked to where the line had just begun to form. The blind couple were walking arm in arm, walking sticks tapping back and forth in perfect sync before them as they strolled. He collided with them before he noticed they were there. They collapsed inward, canes flying in odd directions, one smacking him in the right shin. He barked a note of pain and hobbled away scowling. They waved their canes around, trying to get their bearings, and stared off into space above everyone else’s heads through matching dark sunglasses.

He stood behind a man in a wheelchair. The blind couple fell in behind him. He felt a cane brush the back of his heel.

“Sir. Sir.” He turned and saw a heavyset woman in some sort of uniform coming toward him. “We’re pre-boarding passengers with small children and the disabled. Go sit down until it’s your turn.”

“I mean, I’m already here... I’d hate to lose my spot.”

“Sir, we’ll announce when it’s time for you to board.” She snatched the ticket out of his hand and looked at it. “You’re in Zone 4, which means you’ll board after Zones 1, 2, and 3.” He narrowed his eyes at her.

“I’m sorry; I didn’t quite follow you. Would you mind explaining that again? I’m to go on... between Zones 2 and 3, did you say?”

“Sir, please go sit down.” He headed back to his seat by the outlets, but it had been overrun by a gaggle of traveling vegans. He tried shooing them away, but when they would not be moved, he surrendered and ran for a burger or a wings.

Boarding had begun for his flight and zone by the time he got his wings, so he ate rapidly while walking, trying to shoot meaty, cutting glances at the vegans. They were all eating salad and didn’t seem to notice.

He threw the bones and cardboard container into a garbage can as he passed, and made for the boarding line. Tension flared as he thought he saw her.

“John...?” a familiar voice. He looked up. Tension flared again, but this time did not fade.

“Hi, Katie.” She wasn’t an illusion.

“I guess you’re going back East today too, huh?”

“Oh, no. I sneaked through security to come say goodbye to you,” he said through a gritted smile. The tension was palpable. In fact, his palms were soaked. He feared for the electrical integrity of his headphones, and stuffed them back into his pocket.

“Don’t be an asshole. It’s good to see you, though.”

“It’s... it’s good to see you too, Katie,” he lied. It had been a really nasty breakup. He still cringed at girls who wore knee socks and sent text messages. The silence stretched out between them like stray gum between pavement and shoe. She began to turn, hesitated, looked as though she might speak. Instead, she faced the information screens above the check-in counter. John pulled his headphones back out and jammed them in his ears. He slid the touch-screen lock on his phone and scrolled through songs.

But he looked up to see Katie regarding him again, her small thumbs hooked around the straps of her backpack.

“How’s, uh, Dallas?” John asked.

“He’s really good, actually. We’re getting along great. We got married.” You got what?

“Oh, that’s awesome. Congratulations. You know, I’m really happy for you guys.”

“Yeah. Things between you and I just weren’t going to work, you know?”

“I’ve come to see that, I think. It makes a lot of sense in retrospect.” John almost had to squeeze his eyes shut to get those last lines out. But he played a convincing enough part that she turned her back again, apparently to re-reconfirm that this was, in fact, her right flight and time.

He stared at her shoes. And that meant that a moment later he was regarding her calves, her thighs, her butt, and her back, resting his gaze finally on the back of her head. She was a slight girl, short and dark of hair that she wore now in a single braid halfway down her back. She stood with her feet pressed tightly together and her hands folded in front of her. He’d always loved how she’d rock on the balls of her feet when she had to stand and wait for something. She did it now, and he began looking around for the vegans to see if he could launch regurgitated wings at them, but they had vanished, and eventually the queasy feeling passed as well. When he turned back, she was looking at him again.

“I guess I’ll see you when we get off the flight. If not, then I hope you have a good Christmas,” she said. He mumbled something affirmative, brows knitted. She vanished into the tangle of milling passengers, all squinting at their tickets and pointing at things and squalling at their children. He looked at his boarding pass, and headed up the line. He ladled saccharine smiles on the heavyset woman in the uniform, safe now in his own Zone. She scowled at him.

The inside of the plane was all confusion, passengers everywhere but their seats. A piece of illegally large carry-on luggage fell from an overhead bin, striking a fat man on the head. He fell, and rose red-faced and yelling. The flight attendants moved in like regulatory ninjas to restore order. John squeezed past them and towards “Economy” class. He saw his... ex-girlfriend sitting in the seat next to the one assigned him. He did everything possible to look like he was about to walk past, but when no other course of action presented itself, he stopped and swung his backpack up into the overhead bin. He excused his way past her to sit down next to the window.

“John...?” Katie began.

“This is my seat,” he growled. She didn’t argue. She had a slender wedding ring on her finger. He didn’t look at it.

He didn’t look at the cut of the little diamond, at the little fingers of gold that held it, at the rainbow glint of the light when the sun shone through the stone. He didn’t look at how she kept twisting it on her finger. He did look at the book he’d brought.

Still no words had passed between them by the time most of the passengers had settled into their respective seats. A few chubby Germans in glasses still fiddled with overhead bins, and the illegally large bag in the bin a few rows behind fell out again, onto the same fat man, now in his seat. He rose red-faced and hollering again. The flight attendant ninjas had to restore order. When it was discovered that the bag was, in fact, his, the flight ninjas stuffed him into the aisle seat of an exit row, where large bag and large man could glare angry and silent at each other without disturbing the Zen vibe in the cabin.

John didn’t think about how he and Katie had lain, not six months before, with the jersey sheets pulled over their heads against the morning sun while he did an impression of the professor who’d taught the class where they met. She’d laughed and he’d tickled her. She’d straddled him and tried to hold his arms down. He didn’t think about how the fabric of her yoga pants had felt with her thighs wrapped around his waist. He didn’t look to see if the ones she wore now were those self-same ones. No, what he thought about was a cigarette. A beautiful sweet cigarette that laughed at all your jokes and cared about you for who you really were and didn’t hafta make it official with a ring and a legal document.

The silence lasted a long time.

John could not for the life of him keep his mind on his novel. Katie looked at the screen in front of her, headphones in her ears, and John noted the delicate angle of her nose in profile. Her eyebrows were raised a bit, her lips ever so slightly pursed.

He turned his mind by sheer force back to his book. But then he was looking at her lap. Her hands were slight of bone and folded there. He stopped his restless right leg from bouncing, and looked back at his book. For a moment. Then he was staring at her feet.

--

He thought he heard his name. His right temple hurt as he lifted it from the plastic wall beside him. He shook his head and blinked. Some gunk had collected in one eye, and he lifted a tingling arm—must’ve slept on it—to rub it. He ran a hand through his hair.

“You comfortable?” Katie said. John squinted at her.

“Sorta; could’ve used a pillow, maybe.”

“You looked a little uncomfortable.”

“Wait... did you just wake me up?”

“Yeah. I was going to offer you this—” she held out a neck pillow. He thought he almost recognized it from some previous life.

John reflected that the last time he’d crossed the country, in the other direction, this same girl had been sitting beside him. She’d been looking at him much the same way, but she’d had her legs draped over his lap. And they’d been on a series of buses for a week instead of on a plane for five hours. And the bus trip had gone quicker than this flight.

He took the pillow, and wrapped it around his neck. It smelled like her, a thick flowery scent that overwhelmed the nostrils, all lace doilies and silver tea sets and the prim elegance of a bygone era. And was there another scent? Masculine... righteousness? No, John laughed to himself; that was the smell of having your shit together. He only ever smelled it on the kind of men that made him wish he’d finished college and gotten a real job.

“I’m sure this’ll help,” he said. “Thanks.”

It didn’t; he was completely unable to fall back asleep. In fact, when he laid his head back and let it loll, he found his face angled perfectly to capture the vista of Katie’s legs. Eventually, he ripped the pillow off his neck, and set it in his lap. There was still an ache in his temple where he’d lain on it.

“You have lines on your face,” Katie said. “Right there on your...”

“Yeah, my head kinda hurts.”

“I’d give you an Advil, but I don’t think I have any.” She opened her purse and looked in.

“I’m okay,” John said. “You know I don’t do medicine.”

“Yeah,” she laughed. “I remember you’d rather lay in bed and suffer through a fever than go to the doctor.”

“Not like you minded much,” he said. He recalled a movie watched in bed, while she had without a shred of germ-fear shared a bowl of ice cream with him as he suffered. Pharmacies just didn’t dispense such things.

“You were just milking it. I always knew you were just looking for an excuse to call out of work and stay in bed with me.”

“Aren’t you a married woman now?”

“I’m still me. And I still remember. Getting married doesn’t change that,” she said. “You and I still spent a lot of time together; I don’t only remember the bad parts.” She began to fiddle with her ring.

“Dallas give you that?”

“Who else?” she said with a smile. She’d actually married that cocksure redneck. Probably on her way to see him right now. There was a pause, and Katie looked as if she were about to replace the headphones in her ears. She breathed deeply.

“John, how are you really?” she said. “I know it hasn’t been that long and things are totally different now and everything, but you seem distant, and I’d really like to know what’s really going on with you. I never wanted us to stop talking.” John tried to withdraw his head a little further between his shoulders.

“I’m doing very well,” he said. “Things have been great. I’m sorry we haven’t talked, but I’ve just been really busy and trying to put things together the way I want them.”

“I know you were really upset.”

“Yeah. I guess so. I mean, it wasn’t that bad. Like you said; it just wasn’t going to work out. We were just lying to ourselves.”

“We weren’t lying to ourselves.” Katie paused, frowning. “Things were really good for a long time.”

“Oh, really? Is that so? As I recall, you told me you were completely unhappy with our arrangement from minute one.” He seemed to watch all this from a distance.

“No,” she said. “that’s not it at all. I just wanted different things than you did. I wanted to get married and just be with each other, and you’d...”

“Would you like a drink or a snack, ma’am?” the flight attendant asked. She’d appeared out of nowhere with her cart. John’s ears popped, and the background hum of the flight seemed to increase a few decibels.

“I’ll take a water, thanks,” Katie said. She and the flight attendant both turned their eyes on John.

“Jack Daniel’s?” he said. The flight attendant shook her head. “Red wine? Beer? Something with alcohol.”

“John, we were...”

“Make that three somethings with alcohol, actually,” he said.

“How about Kahlua?” The flight attendant gave him a plastic tumbler filled with wet cylinders of ice and a single-serving Kahlua bottle. He’d poured and knocked back the whole thing before the attendant had pushed the cart away. He leaned over Katie, still looking at him, and tapped the flight attendant, who had turned her back to wave pretzel bags at the passengers across the aisle. She started and turned back to him.

“Sir,” she said. Here comes the stiff politeness, John thought. ‘Sir’ is actually Airline lingo for ‘fuck off.’ “If you’ll give me just a moment.”

“Get me another one of them, when you can,” he said, all sweet grace now with the Kahlua spreading through his gut. Katie’s pretty face was sickening into a mask of revulsion.

“I thought you were sober now,” she said.

“Was.” She looked like she’d smelled something decaying. He didn’t respond, but grabbed the second Kahlua and downed it just like the first. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and wished with ever greater passion for nicotine. Think they’d let me dip on an airplane? he thought. What about them e-cig things? ‘Just water vapor,’ right? No way, he thought. These guys were worse than St. Paul when it came to fun vices. And Katie had turned into a close second, it seemed.

“I don’t get stoned anymore, either,” he explained. “So unlike you, I got on this plane sober.” Katie looked even more disgusted. The flight attendant was pushing the cart down the aisle, and was out of tapping distance, so John had to be content with his current buzz.

“John, this is why we fought. You get so mean,” she said. Her face had melted from disgust back into mere concern. A step in the right direction, John thought. “It used to just make me cry, but I got used to it and now I know that I just don’t want to be talked to like that.”

“Okay, I’m sorry. You just touched a nerve is all. Besides, who was I to ever follow the rules?” She pouted. He resisted the sudden urge to drape an arm around her shoulders. Force of habit, he told himself. Old conditioning. That arm-around-the-shoulders thing always worked, if you delivered a real heartfelt love-ya along with it. Neither of which were appropriate here. He didn’t look at her wedding ring, as if to re-reconfirm this.

“See, when I’m with Dallas, he just loves me. He just treats me well. He treats me like he has respect for me.”

“Hey, lady!” John called out. The flight attendant turned. “I couldn’t get another of them Kahluas, could I?”

“Sir, we only have enough to sell two drinks per passenger.”

“John, stop.”

“What? A two-drink maximum? Ha!” The flight attendant looked tired, and moved a little further down the aisle. Her gone, he turned back to Katie. “You’re soliloquizing,” he snapped, “about your awesome new husband. To your ex-boyfriend. On a plane. No escape.” He rapped on the window to illustrate.

“I just think it’s important you understand.”

“Why? Why is it important to you that I understand any of this? You left,” he said. “You told me you were done and then you kicked me right the hell out. I headed off the down the street and blew my every last penny on cheap hotels and then I slept on the damn beach. What do you want? I haven’t exactly achieved Christ-consciousness since that time, so forgive me if I have trouble just getting over it.”

A young father with dreadlocks peered around the headrest of the aisle seat in front of them, and gave John a glare. He saw to the man’s right his skinny daughter, breathing on the airplane window and drawing smiley faces. She peeked back at John over her seat with big eyes and waved. He smiled his toothiest and winked. Her father’s glare darkened.

“I did not ‘kick you out’! You were the one...” She paused, composed herself. “I’m sorry all that happened to you. I really just wanted to be your friend. I always loved you, just not in that way, John. And Dallas...”

“Look, I get it. Here’s your headphones,” he said. He lifted the limp white cord with a finger and draped the headphones across her lap. He opened his book and went back to it, buzzing with alcohol and adrenalin. Katie stared at him for a long time, but he was not about to give her the satisfaction of noticing.

“Dallas got me pregnant, okay? That’s why we got married so soon.” John tried to pretend to read and to squeeze his eyes shut against that inconvenient truth simultaneously. Neither quite succeeded.

“There really was no reason to share that with me,” he said.

“All I want is for you to be happy!” Katie’s lips tightened in frustration. “Why is that so difficult for you? Why do you have to be angry all the time? It makes me feel angry. And sad.”

“I’ll check with you first, next time,” he said.

“God dammit, John!” He pulled his headphones out of his pocket and stuck them in his ears. He didn’t even bother plugging them into anything, just let the end dangle on the floor. She returned her headphones to her ears and went back to her screen. He heard her sniffle; she was crying softly. His eyes caught those of the angry dad in dreadlocks again.

This time, the silence lasted even longer. John’s buzz crested and settled, and coiled tension gave way to a wet, sloppy feeling. His cigarettes called to him again. He saw the blind couple out of the corner of his eye, and turned to watch the two of them stick-tapping their way up the aisle together. Nobody else saw them vanish into the bathroom together.

He hadn’t always been like this. And he wasn’t so absorbed in fending off Katie’s attempts to make nice that he couldn’t see it. There had been a time when he’d seen some good in her—in the world.

Safe between his headphones, he thought about what had transpired. At an intellectual level he knew he should be happy for her. It had been a few months; long enough that the wounds should at least somewhat have healed. And he’d spent half his time trying to get away from her, anyway.

It must’ve been that sneaking suspicion again, that she’d been right after all. He didn’t remember those days well enough to make any judgment call on that, now. Was that in itself a telltale sign? He preferred not to think about it.

Once upon a time, holed up in a Motel 6 somewhere between Omaha and Vegas, they’d lain together and he’d begun talking. She loved when he talked. Or so he remembered. Memory was a tricky thing.

“We’re cheap, you know? We don’t need a jet ski and a hot-air balloon and six private jets to be happy. Hell, I’m happy right now. In this roach motel in the middle of nowhere. This is just fantastic.” He’d actually said and meant things like that in those days. “And we’re on our way to be free. Free of our parents and all that stupid B.S… living normal lives and getting nine-to-five jobs and having 2.3 kids and dying right when the mortgage is finally paid off. I don’t want any of that.”

“I don’t want that, either. I do want to have kids, though.”

“… Yeah, definitely. We can do that. Not right this second, obviously--we need to get some things together, first. I need to be a little older, for one thing.”

“When I was a little girl, I always said I wanted to get married as soon as possible. I’ve wanted that since I was nine. You helped me see past that.”

“I’m nothing special.” He loved when she implied how special he was. He especially loved denying it. I mean, come on, all the specialest guys who’d ever lived (Buddha, Gandhi, Marilyn Manson) insisted there was nothing different about them. He wasn’t about to spoil the fun by admitting to his specialness.

“But I want to help kids. We could adopt a bunch of them, and...”

“And we’ll move to a commune in Idaho and grow our own food.”

“You can grow the food. I don’t want to work in the fields.”

“That’s why you’re the woman in this. I’ll grow the food and slaughter the pigs...”

“Good Lord!” she said. She was the kind of person who was actually referring to Jesus when she said that. “I always wanted to try raw veganism. Let’s just try it for a little while, see what it’s like.” John stopped. She’d broken his rhythm. Dammit, woman--I’m visualizing, here.

“I like cheese,” he said. “Ricotta and feta and pizza... those things are really good. Maybe vegetarianism. I tried it for those ten days before we left, remember? I felt pretty good. Then again, I ate so much cheese that I think I canceled out any positive vegetarian effects.” He paused, waiting for his rhythm to come back. “But right now we’re talking about a commune in Idaho. I think the commune’s children should be communal, too. Like the Shakers.”

“But we’re not becoming celibate!” she said. Shakers never got much action, however progressive they might be when it came to child-rearing.

“Certainly not.”

Where had that guy gone? he wondered. That guy was a real Positive Peter. Always ready to take on the world. Then again, Positive Peter had had Pretty Patty to keep him positive when life punched him in the gut and all he wanted to do was drink himself to sleep. Maybe Manic Mark was a more appropriate name. He looked at Katie again. She looked the same as she always had. John knew he didn’t. He had a few days’ growth on his face and his shirt had drops of coffee on it. He’d tried to take his coffee up an escalator with him and had paid for it. And the shirt was white.

He looked at Katie yet again. He just couldn’t seem to stop. She was wiping her eyes, and he suddenly felt terrible that he’d made her cry. That was, after all, the same girl he’d felt sure would always be there. Had he really treated her like this? If right now was any indication of what he’d been like in those heady days just before the nastiest break ever, he figured there was probably a good reason she was on a plane to go see the father of her unborn child. Ugh. Babies.

There it was again. Maybe she was right. He thought about the vegans, and the blind couple, and standing in line behind the man in the wheelchair. It all sucked. Everything sucked. Everything was ugh. And he knew better than that. He knew that if everything sucked it was probably his fault and not the outside world’s. He suddenly regretted the Kahlua. But, as some senile old coot in his family tree used to drawl, the regrettin’ of it di’n’t fix it none.

“Katie, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry that I was a lunatic then, and that I’m a lunatic now. I’m sorry that you are married to that guy, but not for you, so don’t get mad. Things did not go my way, and I am pissed the hell off about that.”

“That’s okay, just...”

“Shut up. It hurt. You hurt. But that doesn’t excuse turning on the world. I’m a positive guy. I’m a force for good in the world, and I know that. I choose that. Just because something bad happened to me doesn’t mean everything has to suck. So, you know what? Merry Christmas, and a happy New Year, and all of that other jazz. I choose to be happy about this.”

“That’s really good, John. I really hope you mean that,” she said.

“I do,” he said. “I really do.” The blind couple walked back by, and he thought he saw the woman, the closer of the two, turn her head and smile at him as she walked past.

John and Katie were silent for a moment, and John realized to his minor horror that there was now no graceful exit. He had to continue to sit here. Anticlimax. But he caught himself, and replaced that with the thought that now they’d have a chance to solidify these new-found good graces for a few minutes—hours until the plane landed.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are beginning our initial descent. Please fasten your seat belts and return any trash to the flight attendants,” the pilot said.