Ted stares blankly at the seat before him, wondering how his travel agent could have construed his standard request for more leg room as a request for this miserable seat. His legs are cramped, his neck tense. He remembers an article he once read about ankles swelling on longer flights, creating embolisms that travel to the brain, causing instantaneous death. He loosens his shoelaces.
Before takeoff, he always contemplates death. He sees the conflagration, the twisted wreckage, his name alphabetically arranged in the newspaper with those of the other passengers. He imagines his body in ashes, a smoky mound of cinder, commingled with the bodies of other people having nothing in common but their carry-on luggage. And their destination, he adds after some thought, which means almost nothing when it’s Los Angeles.
He likes to envision his death as a rock falling into a beautiful pond filled with water lilies. Nothing original, an image stolen from Monet. Always the same impressionistic backdrop, muted color dappled with light, filtered through unseen trees overhead. The rock is plunging downward, in slow motion for added effect. He hears the resounding kerplop of it, startled fish darting under the glassy surface. Then he watches the hypnotic ripples of his imaginary death moving outward in concentric circles, perfect symmetry.
He told one of his analysts about this recurring imagery — the rock, the pond, the ripple effect. He told her he thought it was poetic, deep and full of significance. She asked him blandly if he had been fondled as a child, sexually assaulted. She asked him if he thought it was healthy to think of one’s death as nothing more than a drop in the bucket.
“No,” he said, “I have never been molested, and it’s a pond, a beautiful pond, not a bucket.”
“Survivors of molestation rarely remember their victimization, Ted. A survival mechanism blocks it out, while the subconscious continues to suffer.” More therapy would be necessary.
He wanted to talk about the hidden meaning of the rock. Why did it always land in the pond? Why Monet’s pond?
“The rock is merely a manifestation of your feelings of shame and denial,” she said. “The rock is a symbol of your years of abuse, a metaphor for the self-deprecation that goes hand in hand with it.” She was always using patronizing little phrases like that, hand in hand. He protested, of course. She stopped scribbling on his chart and looked at him over her expensive glasses, visibly annoyed. “Don’t project your denial on me, Ted.” She’d work his first name into every sentence, as if he were mentally ill, as if they weren’t alone in her office. “The child inside you is clearly clawing to get out. You have been violated, and I am offering you my help. Do you want help or don’t you?”
Violated, he remembers thinking. What the hell does that mean?
Two analysts later, the same rock is falling, gathering momentum. It splashes into oblivion, followed by silence, which soon is perforated by the sounds of birds, crickets, frogs. Again, nothing original; the sounds were pirated from a nature tape one of his analysts prescribed, with Valium of course, for depression, and for the insomnia that goes hand in hand with it. So he’d pop his Valium like gumdrops, put on the tape, and take his depression to the heart of Yosemite, like camping equipment.
He pictures his colleagues at the firm, packing up his little office in cardboard boxes, reassigning cases of forgotten clients. Tish, his secretary, would make a spectacle of herself, shed crocodile tears over her microwaved lunch, soak up the sympathetic pats of her co-workers. Privately, she’d be elated, remembering all too well the time he told her to remove her filthy Nikes, that they were unprofessional attire for the workplace. He, of course, knew nothing of her aching feet, her two-mile walk from the bus stop, the heels that gave her blisters. He had paid parking under the building, the bastard.
He imagines his cat, dejected, starving, suddenly homeless. Would his neighbor have the decency to feed it? His cupboard contains only four cans of cat food, enough for the weekend but clearly not enough for a lifetime, not even in cat years. He begins to calculate his own age in cat years, putting himself beyond his midlife crisis, into senior citizenhood, into the grave. When did his thoughts get this complicated? His analyst’s face looms large, her eyes magnified through thick lenses. Your thoughts got this complicated when you were molested, Ted.
A stewardess is holding a yellow, cupped mask to her face, pretending to breathe comfortably, pretending that oxygen will be the simple rejoinder “if we should temporarily experience a loss of cabin pressure.” Before the oxygen mask drops, he will be floating aimlessly like a balloon above the billowing trapdoor floor of clouds, having been sucked through one of those tiny windows, bones snapping like popsicle sticks.
The plane taxis. The captain’s voice is muffled over the speaker, monotone without a trace of enthusiasm: “A gorgeous day in Los Angeles.” An oxymoron, Ted decides, recalling the smog alert there before he left. The stewardess will not take her seat, even though the captain has ordered, unambiguously, “Flight attendants, please prepare for takeoff.” She’s chatting with a woman in first-class, mixing a Bloody Mary. She ignores the fascist in the cockpit. She’ll take her seat when she is good and ready.
The anticlimax of takeoff. He is soon asleep, face mashed against the window, mouth wide open. His ex-wife, Peg, is sitting up in the bed they used to share. She’s drinking her morning coffee, laughing, her hair tousled. He’s wearing silk pajamas, feeling romantic, exotic really. Funny, he thinks, he doesn’t have silk pajamas. He’ll have to remember to buy some; they look good on him. She caresses his temples, running her fingers through his hair, more hair than he had even then. Where on earth did he get these pajamas, their silken folds draped over his body so seductively? He strokes her head, her hair black as onyx, fragrant, familiar. She wants him, he thinks. I want you, she says in a throaty Linda Lovelace whisper.
The call of the wild, whatever that is, is surging through him, an erection so stiff and obvious that the old woman next to him can see it pushing against his pants. She turns away in disgust.
Suddenly he is awake, painfully aware of the prank he has again played on himself, feeling the humiliation and resentment of his shrinking penis. The old woman next to him is looking at him sideways over her needlepoint.
He pictures himself on top of Peg, in the missionary position as usual. A pathetic sight really, lying there on top of her, quivering with excitement. He winces at the sight of himself, stroking her hair, running his fingers through it, smelling it like a bunch of daisies. He should’ve pulled it out in clumps when he had the chance, dragged her around by it like a Neanderthal. Neanderthals pre-dated missionaries by thousands and thousands of years. Which came first, the missionary or the missionary position?
Very interesting, Ted. Why the reference to missionaries? His analyst removes her glasses with arthritic slowness and deliberation. He waits for the follow-up. There was always a follow-up. Was it a priest, Ted? Was it a Catholic priest who fondled you? She looks down at her pad, scribbling notes again.
Why is he having a conversation with this analyst after all these years? Why is he craving her approval now, after storming out of her pretentious Westside office, calling her a crackpot? Because I was right all along, Ted.
The stewardess carelessly drops nuts on his tray, spills some club soda into a plastic cup. The old woman next to him hands it to him clumsily, disturbed by the necessity of the contact, handing the cup at arm’s length, like a urine sample.
He lurches forward. The child behind him is kicking his seat so hard there is soda fizzing in little droplets on his tie. He turns slightly, giving the woman next to the child, clearly the mother, an angry look through the crack in the seat. The child jabs his seat again, harder this time, giggling. He flashes the mother another look that unmistakably says, “Your kid is kicking my seat. Don’t just sit there, you moron!” She volleys back a menacing stare that says, “Quit projecting on me, you asshole, just because you were molested as a child.” Another kick, then another, rabbit punches to the small of his back. He spins around in his seat, and the mother’s eyes are riveted on him; he is a threat to the safety, well-being, and happiness of her child. “Over my dead body,” her eyes say. She will fight him to the death, like cocks in a dirt ring, like mongooses.
“Your child is kicking my seat. Please control your child,” he says, his face trembling as he struggles to maintain his lawyerly composure. He has always been inarticulate when angry, monosyllabic, sounding primitive and witless as a cave dweller. The fight-or-flight response, he thinks, recalling a psychology class or a “Wild Kingdom” rerun. Or was it a therapy session? No, Ted. It was a rap session. Of course, a rap session, with other survivors of molestation, alcoholism, the Holocaust, whatever. They all had survived something horrible and unspeakable. They sat in a large semicircle on the carpet of the analyst’s office, staring dumbly at each other. They had nothing in common except their survivor status. And they had nothing to say to each other, not a word, no rapping. They were billed separately.
“She is not kicking your seat,” the woman fires back at him, spitting vindictive emphasis into each word. “She is playing with it!” This is apparently a distinction of enormous significance, the eternal kicking-playing dichotomy, a universal truth, like yin and yang. She continues to read her magazine as if she has simply stated the obvious.
“I don’t care if your child is playing or kicking,” he says. “I want it to stop right now.” He almost adds that he’ll call the stewardess if she doesn’t control her child, but decides against it. He’d be the picture of impotence, desperately pushing the call button, sniveling, swearing that the kid was kicking the seat, honest she was.
“This is not a lifetime flight, you know,” the woman adds. He cannot fight this immutable logic, like the kicking-playing distinction. The woman smiles at him. Her look says, “Checkmate.”
He suddenly notices the other passengers. They’re concealing laughter, he realizes, exchanging furtive glances. All the makings of a mob. Their eyes are trained on him as he hangs lamely over his seat.
He turns around, sinking back into his seat. The child is still at play. She is not kicking his seat. She is Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, milking cows or lugging pails of water from the well. Why all the little-girl imagery, Ted? Did you know that victims of molestation often turn into perpetrators of abuse?
The mother is telling the woman next to her that some people just hate children, and that she hates people who hate children. The woman says she understands, that she has a Siamese cat, and so she, naturally, hates people who hate animals. He wants to tell the woman who hates people who hate animals that he does not hate children. Of course you hate children, Ted. You hate children because they remind you of yourself, your years of sexual abuse.
Suddenly, a realization. Perhaps Peg hadn’t been kicking his seat either when she made him so crazy his hair fell out, not gracefully, but in clumps so big they clogged the shower drain. She may have been playing with his seat when his insides started looking like Swiss cheese.
He remembers his doctor’s concerned expression as he examined the X-ray of his stomach. White light poured through the holes in his stomach lining. He asked Ted if he had been having emotional problems, if he had thought about seeing someone, a therapist perhaps.
So this is a broken heart, Ted thought, not shiny and red with a zigzagging crack running through it. He wondered who started the myth that love was contained in the human heart. Love wasn’t in the heart; it was somewhere in the stomach lining, its pink walls looking delicate and flimsy as a plastic trash bag.
The kicks to his seat are harder now. He pretends he is Grasshopper from the television show “Kung Fu,” Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm becoming Master with flowing white beard, the yolky whites of her blind eyes shining brightly. He must concentrate, endure the blows of Master’s bamboo cane on his back until he reaches L.A. He likes this image of himself: David Carradine, dressed in peasant clothing and a straw hat from Wardrobe, a bamboo flute at his side. Grasshopper must learn to tolerate the whacks of Master’s cane, learn to walk the length of rice paper, fragile as the wings of a dragonfly. He must ponder the eternal question, the kicking-playing dichotomy, come to understand that this is not a lifetime flight.
The plane is landing, racing downward into the dense cloud of smog hanging low over L.A. He squints into the setting sun, an enormous sphere of distorted color: burnt orange, sienna, magenta. Crayola colors, he decides, nontoxic and waxy looking. The cabin glows in the filtered light of soot, carbon monoxide, long, nameless chains of chemicals. The sky is awash in muted then screaming violet, the clouds an inferno.
The wheels bounce roughly on the runway. As he reaches overhead for his briefcase, the woman behind him flashes him a menacing, territorial look, her arm stretched stiffly across Rebecca’s chest. The stewardess cannot muster a smile for him as he leaves the plane, sensing his defeat, smelling it on him like cheap cologne, like Aqua Velva.
As he looks for his own bag, he is mesmerized by the endless stream of luggage, by the sheer ugliness of the bags, some tapestried, some severely beaten and worn, others with shiny wheels, some semblance of enthusiasm. There’s no such thing as beautiful luggage, he decides, scanning the conveyor belt. Clearly a metaphor for the emotional baggage you’ve been carrying around all these years, Ted, all those hideous bags full of secrets, full of shame.
He watches the most mundane of reunions, people and their luggage. Reluctant reunions really, like greeting hated relatives, although a woman is screaming at a nodding representative behind the TWA counter over the loss of hers. Other passengers claim their bags and move past her, a fellow human severed from her hair dryer, makeup, panties, checkbook, all the things that made her human, gave her shape and definition. Helium-filled angst surrounded by a Red Sea of baggage-lugging humanity, parting with utter indifference to her misery. She floats weightlessly about the terminal, untethered, cut from her middle-class anchor. He watches her drift above the baggage claim, then toward an exit, shapeless as smoke.
There is a larger meaning here than Ted cares to contemplate, something positively existential. He can feel the whole meaning of human relationships, the key to life itself, hovering amorphously around him. It is invisible yet tangible, like the smell of Peg he imagines still clings to the bedsheets. A moment of vertigo, strangely alluring and invigorating. No, he decides, he doesn’t want to understand it yet. He’d much rather wait, a lifetime if necessary. He snatches his bag, a touch of nausea settling in the wake of his resolve. He will confront this intimation, this larger significance, when he is staring into the Bright Light, paralyzed like a deer in the middle of a country road, staring bug-eyed at his death, approaching fast and furious.
This story previously appeared in the Greensboro Review.
— Ed
