Excelsior!

Mr. Barbicane Takes A Trip was written between November 1st and November 30th of 2005 as part of National Novel Writing Month which challenges all comers to create a minimum of fifty-thousand words of prose during the thirty days of the event.

Are you ready for NaNoWriMo 2006?

If you're just arriving, these chapters were posted in order. To read the book from the beginning, scroll down to Chapter One. Have a nice trip.

Chapter Thirty-three

As Vivian Teller danced for her dog it was black outside the windows of the MD-80 where Diana sat on the arm rest of 4-B leaning close to Lloyd Barton. She could see her reflection in the window behind him. She thought she was sitting to great advantage. In the parking lot of The Olive Garden the growing darkness was held back by the mercury vapor lamps as Vickie and her mother walked toward the restaurant. They could see Rory waiting for them by the door.

Near Donegal, Pennsylvania, night poured into The Durwood Family Drive-In, but Mr. Barbicane did not notice.

He had made the choice not to proceed and was comfortable with that decision. As the details of the inside of the car around him grew dim and indistinguishable, he continued the process by which he gave himself over to this new condition of motionlessness.

Mr. Barbicane was becoming the still center of everything, the axis about which all else turned. All around him people moved and spun and danced, but Mr. Barbicane did none of these things. Other people might love and lose and blunder through life, but not Mr. Barbicane. He has decided to remain where he is. He will never arrive and he will not be missed. No longer the passenger, no longer in motion.

The thought of this warms Mr. Barbicane as he looks through the windshield and smiles. Ahead of him is the blank screen of the theater, becoming less distinct with every passing moment.

Soon it will be impossible to know where the screen ends and where the sky begins.

Chapter Thirty-two

The sky outside the windows of the MD-80 would be dark by the time Diana broke again with company policy and gave Lloyd Barton her telephone number. They were flying east, into the night.

But it was earlier in Dallas-Ft. Worth and there was still light in the sky when Vivian Teller took Charley for a walk through the park a half mile from her apartment building. She had purchased a leash and other items at a pet store earlier in the day. On the way out of the store she passed a vending machine that would create engraved identification tags while you wait. She inserted the appropriate money and used a keyboard on the machine to type in her information. A few minutes later she had a tag in her hand with her last name and telephone number stamped on it. She’d read that you shouldn’t put the dog’s name on such tags.

When she got home from the pet store she found Charley on the bed again. She used a pair of pliers to attach the new tag to his collar and he spent the rest of the day jingling wherever he went in the house.

Vivian listened to how different her house sounded with a dog in it and she very much liked the new background. They went for a short walk around the neighborhood in the afternoon, but Vivian decided they needed to explore on their before dinner evening walk so she tugged Charley in a different direction, toward the park.

It was a manicured multi-purpose community oriented sort of park. Rolling expanses of grass trimmed to almost golf course intensity, a globular shaped pond surrounded by a concrete walkway wide enough for silly looking, canopied, two-seater sit down bicycle contraptions you could rent by the hour from a shed near the lake. There was an area dedicated to family cook-outs with black metal barbecue grills attached to metal poles driven into the ground. Vivian’s favorite thing in the park was the small band shell set at one end of the lake, facing a hillside. They did concerts here in the summer. Light classical things, Gilbert and Sullivan, show-tunes. And on the Fourth of July they played The Stars and Stripes for a finale, supplementing the Sousa with skyrockets fired from a barge floating at the center of the pond.

Charley approved of this park to the point where Vivian had trouble keeping up with him as he ran from smell to smell. She would have let him off his new leash, but she was afraid he’d run off and get lost in this unfamiliar place and she would lose him. So she ran after him, trying to run fast enough so that the dog could move at his own pace. He went from stroll to trot to gallop, stretching his thin legs out in front and behind, ears blowing back, face up, mouth open, experiencing some rapture forbidden to lowly bipeds.

All Vivian could do was hang on, try to keep up, and laugh.

They stayed in the park a very long time, past sunset and into the beginning of twilight. They walked around the pond twice then headed up the hill above the band shell, climbing up to the near horizon. Near the crest of the hill Charley stopped and sat down. Vivian gave him water from the handsome blue walking bottle she bought for him at the pet store. Charley lapped loudly then stretched out on the grass.

Vivian sat next to the dog and felt safe enough to put down her end of the leash. She looked down at the band shell. The Fourth of July program always opened with Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man which she liked, but there was so much more Copland she liked better. There was, in particular, a piece her dancer lover used in a solo performance, a piece called Poetic, Somewhat Mournful from Copland’s works for piano and violin. At the beginning of the piece the lights would find her standing alone on stage, wearing a white danskin and a diaphanous purple cape. The music would start and she would move in fluid ways you would never think a human body could achieve. Few could do it as well as she. This sweet, sad, lost music playing and her moving alone on stage.

At first you think she’s looking for something, then you realize she’s not. She’s lost something or she’s waiting for something, but you know it’s not about searching. Vivian was never sure what the piece was about and she never asked because she was afraid her lover would think her impenetrably stupid. But she loved the piece and she loved watching her dance it. She loved the sheen of sweat across her throat and the taste of the salt when she came off stage and they kissed.
Where was her dancer now?

Vivian stood, slapped the cut grass off the backside of her jeans and slipped her hands into the back pockets. It was getting dark. They’d have to head home soon.

She took a step away from Charley and then another step and then she lifted her leg and held it in the air for a moment before she folded her knee and brought the toe of her running shoe down on the earth. She thought about how the piece set to Poetic, Somewhat Mournful began.

Vivian turned her back on Charley for a moment, and she began to dance. She was older now, older than her lover had been when they were together and she was never a dancer so she knew the movements would be slow and stiff and far removed from graceful. She just wanted to see if she could remember them. And she did. The dance came back to her, not through her memory, but from somewhere else inside her.

And as Vivian Teller danced on the side of the hill she understood the dance her lover danced so many years ago. It wasn’t about loss or searching or waiting, it was about something very different, something Vivian could never have known before she danced it herself on the darkening hill.

The light was going quickly. Vivian could barely make out the shape of Charley on the grass as she moved in front of him. But dogs see very well at twilight so while Vivian could not see Charley in detail, Charley could see her very well. He had lifted his head when she first stood, assuming this was a signal that they would be going and there might be food at the end of the journey. Then she stepped away from him and started to move in a way he’d never seen a human move before. He was fascinated and grateful as only a dog can be grateful.

You see, no one had ever danced for Charley before.

Chapter Thirty-one

The first time Diana saw the scratch on the passenger side of her car was when she turned to look back at it in the employee parking lot at Pittsburgh International Airport. She hadn’t seen it when she got in the car and backed out of her space, but she did see the empty Stoli bottle on the cement when the car cleared it. She put the VW in park, undid her seatbelt and went to pick up the bottle and throw it in the recycling. It was empty and Diana assumed the remaining contents had spilled when the bottle rolled under the car because she certainly didn’t remember finishing it. The cap, however, was securely on the empty bottle.

Diana looked down and squinted through her sunglasses. She saw the lotto ticket on the floor and started to reach down for it. Her head was suddenly filled with liquid razor blades, pumped in an amazingly high pressure. She started to straighten up then figured the hell with it and dropped to her haunches and picked up the ticket. Diana put the ticket in her bag and told her aching brain to remember it was there so she could check the numbers later.

She disposed of the bottle, got back in the car and carefully navigated out of the garage. The drive to the airport was painfully bright, but otherwise uneventful.

Diana found a parking space near the shuttle stop and was walking toward the bus shelter when she realized she couldn’t remember beeping on her car alarm. That’s when she turned, reaching for her keys, and looked back at the car and saw the scratch. She had no idea how it had gotten there. She had no memory of hitting the recycling bins, crushing the ornamental lawn sculpture of the man with the burro and the cart, and she was completely oblivious to the fact that she had severed the prehensile tale of a Virginia Opossum.

Whatever happened to her car, she believed, must have happened while she was working her last shift, the one that brought Mr. Barbicane to Pittsburgh. It couldn’t have happened at her apartment building because the passenger side of her car was against a cinderblock wall at the end of a row. Someone must have scratched her car in the parking lot and not even bothered to leave a note. The scratch must have been there last night and she was simply too tired or it was too dark to notice. That was the only way such a thing could have happened. If someone had scratched the car when she was in it, she’d have known it.

On the shuttle bus she had checked herself for any residual waves of nausea and found that everything was just fine. There was still a headache, but that’s why God made Excedrin. She had taken between four and six of the caplets since she woke up and would take some more before boarding her flight. There was also dehydration to be addressed. She drank a bottle of Gatorade on the way into the airport and would get another as she went through the terminal. Diana was a little concerned about her stuffed up sinus, they could be painful in flight, but she had some nasal spray for that. She’d use it closer to departure time. So, really, all was just fine. Except for the stupid scratch on her car.

She checked in, headed for the gate, ran into her crew mates in the concourse, talked about nothing, brushed past the early check-ins and boarded the MD-80 she would be working on, which was similar in many ways to the machines Mr. Barbicane had flown on the previous days, but older and configured for fewer passengers. She would be flying to Syracuse, New York then on to Halifax, Nova Scotia this afternoon and evening.

Diana had kept her sunglasses on until they opened the aircraft for boarding. If anyone asked she would have told them she had a little migraine, which would have helped her if later in the flight the hangover staged a second assault. But no one asked her about the sunglasses.

The only painful part of prepping the cabin was trying to read the paperwork on the meal and drink carts, the manifests detailing what food was on board. This required focus and that sent needles through the back of her eyes. Otherwise, except for just a little additional sweating which she felt on her upper lip and some tearing at the corner of her eyes which she was afraid would ruin her make-up, it was all routine.

She paid little attention to the passengers as they arrived. Few children, which was good. She slipped into the forward lavatory to swallow another three Excedrin along with most of the water bottle she was working on, then used the nasal spray to open up her sinuses. She patted the sweat off her upper lip, checked her make-up, which was really just fine, and then went back to complete the boarding process.

Push back happened at the appointed time. Diana performed the safety mime in the forward cabin, something she always liked to do, then did a fast walk through to check belts before returning forward to the galley where she pulled down the starboard jump-seat and belted herself in. Ritual was removing her from any lingering discomfort.

She had worried about the climb to cruising altitude, what that might do to her head and there had been a nasty twinge as they went through twenty-thousand feet. But she shut her eyes and pressed her head back against the bulkhead and toughed it out. She breathed deeply, feeling the cool recirculated air fill her head, rushing past the artificially contracted blood vessels of her sinuses. There had been some difficulty breathing after the face lift and cheek implants which lasted longer than she expected based on what the surgeon had told her, but it eventually subsided, and the results were certainly worth the minor inconvenience.

As the plane climbed Diana thought about how well things were going, what a good point she was at in her life. She couldn’t even be bothered to work herself up over the idiot who scratched her car. You have to let that sort of thing go. You can’t sweat the little things.

She found the vibration of the plane coming through the back of her head pressed against the bulkhead to be a comforting massage, taking away what was left of the hangover. This made her smile. Now it would be unnecessary to go to the minor trouble of sneaking any restorative alcohol during the flight.

She heard the tone from the cockpit informing her that they had reached cruising altitude. She took a deep grateful breath and unstrapped herself in order to go about her job.

Diana removed her jacket and took around the drinks ordered by the first class passengers prior to take off. She took this opportunity to inquire what selections they had made from the dinner menu.

She leaned over the empty 4-B to give the man in 4-A his Diet Coke with lime. He took the cup from her, which was when she became aware the man was looking at her augmented breasts. They were much more dramatic when she took off her uniform jacket and moved around the cabin in the white blouse with the blue epaulettes. This pleased her. She asked the man what he wanted for dinner. He looked down at his menu and then back at Diana to ask for the Seafood Pasta. But as soon as he looked at her, his eyes clicked down to her breasts again, outlined against the stretched fabric of the blouse as she leaned across the open seat to hear his order. But what was sweet about this was that he didn’t seem to be embarrassed to be looking. He was impressed, but not ashamed of being impressed and Diana liked this response most of all. A man could go a great distance with a response like that without even knowing it.

She straightened up and continued through the cabin, but she continued to think about the man in 4-A who was in his late thirties, good looking, no visible wedding ring, good suit, and able to afford a first class seat. She wondered if he was getting off in Syracuse or flying on to Nova Scotia. This was going to be a lovely flight.

Diana was not wrong about the good looking man in 4-A; he had in fact been looking at her breasts and his attention was indeed indicative of respect. He very much admired her breasts and felt immediately drawn to them. It should be noted, however, that his desire was less about access and more about envy. For the man in seat 4-A was Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne engineer Lloyd Barton who found in the shape and proportions of Diana’s breasts, their apparent substance and gravity, the ideal he had always wished to somehow posses. Lloyd Barton coveted Diana’s breasts.

Later in the flight, Diana will pause before serving Lloyd’s Seafood Pasta to adjust her kerchief to one side and open the top two buttons of her blouse (this against airline regulations pertaining to the dress and deportment of employees). She will bring Lloyd his meal and once again lean across the unoccupied 4-B. She will do so with unmistakable emphasis and she will linger so long that when she finally steps back Lloyd will have been so dissembled by the proximity of what he has always wanted that it will be difficult for him to eat and he will leave much of his meal untouched. This will give Diana an additional opening to speak to him later when she collects his tray and asks if the meal was all right.

Lloyd will look up from the open neck of Diana’s blouse and they will pretend to have a conversation about airline food and good places to eat in Halifax, each of them aware that the conversation they are having has nothing to do with what they are talking about, but each unaware of what the conversation is actually about.

There is the potential here for something between Lloyd and Diana. But it is not the potential either one suspects.

Chapter Thirty

They initially had sex right there in the hallway at the base of the attic stairs. Vickie would later learn that Rory had come over to the house and let himself in when the doorbell went unanswered. Vickie couldn’t hear it up in the attic.

What she never learned, because Rory never told her, was that he was coming over to break up with her. The previous night, picking her up at the airport, the chill in the car, that had all been the last straw. It was pointless to go on like this, so Rory decided to just pull the plug. He went over after he knew Vickie’s mom would have left for the library and rang the bell. There was no answer, but he knew about the emergency key in the plastic rock next to the porch so he let himself in and called Vickie’s name from the bottom of the stairs in the entrance way.

He heard someone moving around the upper part of the house and went up the stairs. He looked down the length of the hallway and saw his oddly shaped person coming down the stairs from the ladder all bundled up in an old army uniform or something.

Rory took a couple of steps down the hall then the person reached the bottom step and turned and he saw it was Vickie swimming around in these old clothes; a jacket and pants and a man’s shirt with a tie and this army cap falling down over her eyes.

She felt there was no way she could explain this to him. She couldn’t explain it to herself. She looked down at herself, all lost in her daddy’s clothes.

For a second he thought she was going to start crying. What did she have to cry about? She lifted her arms in a sort of shrug, sort of “well” gesture and she looked at him and she started to blush. He could see the color move from her ears, across her forehead and down to her cheeks.

He wanted her to know whatever it was it was okay and he reached out for her, just to hug her, just a “don’t worry” hug. But there was something about seeing her in those clothes, seeing her look so small and lost in that uniform.

She knew she had to say something, but in the next second Rory was kissing her and the best thing to do under the circumstances was to kiss him back. She did and she felt the blush run down her neck and right into her body.

Rory unbuttoned the jacket and reached in to cup Vickie’s left breast under her father’s shirt and things progressed very rapidly. They were on the floor and Vickie was snaking out of the oversized pants, but she never got out of the shirt or the jacket before Rory was on top of her.

The cap came off her head and rolled away on the hallway carpet.

If it was weird, Vickie didn’t notice. Or if she did notice, she sort of liked it.

They moved from the hallway to Vickie’s bedroom and stayed there for three hours. In the pauses between sex Rory never asked what the hell Vickie was doing in her father’s uniform or what was the matter with her the night before, and Vickie volunteered nothing. They just sort of caught their breath.

In this manner the bargain was struck.

Rory eventually got dressed and left before Vickie’s mother got home from the library. Vickie invited him to join them at The Olive Garden.

Vickie went downstairs naked and poured a big glass of orange juice then went back to her room and took an amazingly satisfying shower. Then she got dressed and went out into the hall where she collected her father’s uniform and climbed back into the attic. Up where she put the uniform, shirt and tie back on their hangers and back into the garment bag. She rebagged the cap and put it away as well, then grabbed the shoes and sweats and t-shirt she wore when she first climbed into the attic, went back down and pushed the attic stairs shut on their thick springs.

Vickie came downstairs with her sweats and t-shirt and went the long way around to the back of the house so she could stop and look at the pictures on the mantel underneath the simulated oil portrait her parents had made out of Vickie’s high school graduation picture. One of the framed pictures over the fireplace was a picture of her dad in his uniform, standing at the entrance to Chinatown in San Francisco. He looks about twenty-five in the picture and he’s smiling for the camera.

Vickie stood there in the living room looking at the picture of her father. She took a deep breath, realizing her heart was no longer tainted by confusion. After a long moment she turned away from the picture, went into the kitchen, tossed her t-shirt and sweats in the washing machine, selected “small load” and started the washer. Then she made a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich for herself. As she did so, she started to sing Sheep May Safely Graze.

Schafe können sicher weiden,
Wo ein guter Hirte wacht.
Wo Regenten wohl regieren
Kann man Ruh und Friede spüren.

Which in English is:

Sheep may ever graze securely 
Where a worthy shepherd wakes.
Where the rulers well are ruling,
May one rest and peace discover.

The rest became humming as Vickie ate her sandwich.

Chapter Twenty-nine

The Durwood Family Drive-In was carved out of a parcel of what had been meadow and grazing for the Durwood Family goats and cows. The particular piece of land ran along what was then called Jones Mill Road, a two-lane county maintained road which literally rolled through the hills of the area South of Donegal in the part of Pennsylvania just above the border with West Virginia.

The theater was the dream of one of the Durwood sons who came back from Korea and couldn’t get his mind around farming. This was Gregory Durwood, the youngest. Gregory convinced his father to turn the pasture over to him and he would make it much more profitable than it could ever be keeping dairy cattle. His father, who hadn’t seen a movie since So Proudly We Hail which he always remembered for the scene in which Veronica Lake put grenades in her bra and marched into a band of Japanese soldiers and pulls the pins, loved his son very much and let him have the land.

Young Gregory did much of the grading of the land and building of the screen and facilities himself. He decided to leave the grass. This made the Durwood Family Drive-In one of the handful of such establishments that wasn’t essentially a lumpy macadam parking lot facing a screen. The Durwood was green. It had room for perhaps a hundred cars in five curving rows facing a thirty foot by fifty foot wooden screen that was set at the edge of the property to block the setting sun behind it.

The projection equipment was built on top of the concession stand, which offered popcorn, bottles of soda, Mrs. Durwood’s goat cheese chili, and a large variety of salted snacks such as potato chips and pretzels.

Seeing a movie at the Durwood Family Drive-In was like seeing a movie in a Pennsylvania pasture, because that was precisely what you were doing. It was unlike any movie going experience available anywhere else in the world and Gregory Durwood was exceptionally proud of that. His father saw how happy the enterprise made his son and was glad he’d made the decision even before Gregory’s prediction came true and the pocket of converted meadow became more profitable as a movie theater than it had ever been as pasture.

Throughout the late Fifties and Sixties, the Durwood operated every weekend between Memorial Day and Halloween, and every night of the week between the Fourth of July and Labor Day showing second and third run features from sunset till about midnight. Gregory Durwood was on hand for every showing, wearing a dark suit he acquired from the McCormick boys when they closed their mortuary.

Gregory married one of the McCormick girls, Sybil, and they had two children Janet and Harley, named after Sybil’s mother and Gregory’s dad who died of a stroke in 1964.

Gregory Durwood was one of the many who felt the movie business change in the 70s. He was getting older, the crowds were getting thinner, and less interested in the movies. And the movies themselves were no longer the things Gregory felt were appropriate for projection in a pasture.

So, in October of 1979 The Durwood Family Drive-In ceased operation after the final showing of The Adventures of Stella Star featuring Caroline Munro, Marjoe Gortner and Christopher Plummer which had been produced in Italy under the title Scontri stellari oltre la terza dimensione.

The theater closed but was not torn down. It remained in the pasture adjacent to Jones Mill Road essentially the way it was on that long ago night of dubbed galactic adventure. This was due to Gregory’s decision to paint the place every now and then and cut the grass when he thought to do it. He continues to live in the house on the other side of the stand of trees to the north of the theater. Sybil is still alive. The two kids moved out after college. Harley is gay. He hasn’t told his parents, but they sort of know.

So when Mr. Barbicane eased his rented Ford Fusion off the county road and along the grass choked approach to the ticket booth, then into the rows with their metal stalks for the speakers long since removed, his was the first car to face the white wooden screen in more than twenty years.

Mr. Barbicane had recovered control when he felt the wheels of his car easing onto the shoulder across from the farm stand, but he still felt profoundly shaken, too shaken to proceed just then. He took the first turn off he found and that lead him to the Durwood Family Drive-In which seemed a good place to stop and collect himself.

Mr. Barbicane parked at the center of the theater, halfway between the screen and the concession stand/projection booth. There he turned off the engine and, still holding the steering wheel, tried to collect himself.

He had been deeply disturbed by the sight of the farm stand, particularly the sight of the old Franklin stove set by the side of the road. But he didn’t know why. The dream he had in the hotel room only a few hours earlier was unavailable to his conscious mind. He had a sense that something had distressed him while he slept, he knew that from the unease he’d felt when he took the band-aid off his finger. But, as with the band-aid, he was unable to associate the anxiety produced by the Franklin stove with the sequence of events acted out in his dream.

All he knew is that he was afraid. Afraid to move forward.

His inability to recall the dream was probably a kindness. Because if he had remembered the specifics of what he saw in his sleep and how they matched up with the reality he saw on the road, he would have been a good deal more frightened than he was at the moment. And he was not in a condition where he could take much more.

He thought for sure he was going to die as he drove through the Pennsylvania countryside. Driving he had experienced the pain he always feared, not the idea of the pain, but the reality of it.

There were still ghosts of that pain as he sat in his car facing the blank screen of The Durwood Family Drive-in, echoes of the squeezing intensity that bent him over the wheel of the car a few miles back. If the sight of the Franklin stove hadn’t stopped him, then the pain surely would have.

But now that he had stopped, now that he was no longer in motion, the pain was subsiding. Something irrational told him that the pain would return the moment he started the engine and resumed his trip. He was certain of this although he had no way or reason to know this.

He was at a loss. He had to keep going, but if he kept going he would die. Death would be awkward enough, but he was expected. People were waiting for him to arrive. He had to do something. Imagine what would happen if he, Mr. Barbicane, failed to arrive.

And he stopped to imagine just that.

A cloud drifted across the drive-in movie theater that was once a pasture and covered Mr. Barbicane’s car. And with the cloud came Mr. Barbicane’s conclusion, the result of imagining a world in which he did not arrive.

If Mr. Barbicane didn’t arrive, no one would notice.

His hands slipped off the steering wheel. The events of his dream were still out of reach, but more of their feelings, their emotions came to him. The feeling of being not only late, but too late. Of thinking he was part of something then seeing it seemed to be going along just fine without him. Of arriving and finding he had been tricked into arriving. That the thing he was going to was not what he thought it was.

The image of the young woman in the open coffin remained unavailable to his conscious mind and, really, that was a good thing. If her face returned to his memory now, if she came swimming up to his eyes and he remembered, considering the state he was in, it would not help him at all. Neither in the short term nor the long term.

He thought he would be filled with anger at the thought of no one noticing he wasn’t there, but surprisingly he discovered he wasn’t. He searched his heart for some rancor over being overlooked in his absence and found none. Rather the emotions he found were oddly comforting, like the sweet anonymity of traveling. Traveling without ever having to arrive.

There was, after all, a tremendous burden related to arriving. There were expectations he would be measured against, responsibilities he would be pressured to take on as his own. All this from people, he suddenly realized, didn’t really want him there at all.

It was all a trap. He was being lured someplace. He knew this, or thought he knew this when really it was just another trace of the dream pricking at his memory.

Mr. Barbicane realized this situation would require a substantial amount of concentrated thought if he was to discern the best possible way to proceed. So he sat there, considering all the factors, while the Duratec 2.3 liter, 16 valve I4 engine of his Ford Fusion clicked and ticked as it cooled in the afternoon breeze.

Chapter Twenty-eight

Diana attacked her hangover with the usual combination of Vitamin C and Vitamin B, several thousand milligrams of each, and four Extra Strength Excedrin washed down with most of a bottle of room temperature Coca-Cola. She supplemented the face cloth soaked in cold water placed over her eyes with a Zip-Lock sandwich bag filled with crushed ice and balanced on her nose as she stretched out on her bed. She’d checked her bloody nose when she got out of the shower and while it looked a little swollen it didn’t look as bad as she thought it was going to look.

She spent most of the late morning and early afternoon in bed, turning over the cloth on her eyes every few minutes or so, adjusting the bag of ice and keeping it on her nose even after the ice had melted, and breathing.

In retrospect it might not have been such a good idea to stop for the bottle of vodka on the way home. In was almost certainly a mistake to pull over that one time to have more of the Stoli half way home when really, the buzz was going quite well at that moment.

But she had purchased the bottle and she had stopped on the way home and that’s just how things happen sometimes. She was suffering enough without beating herself up over a decision that was made so long ago.

Each time she lifted the cloth to flip it, to put the freshly evaporated and therefore cooler side against her eyes, she looked over at the Seusss-like alarm clock she bought at Ikea when she was furnishing the apartment. She watched the morning and then the afternoon go buy in fifteen, twenty and occasional forty minute increments.

She would have to get up at some point and try to put something in her stomach. The very thought of this tightened her throat and brought a thread of something burning into her mouth. She swallowed it down.

The process would have to begin by three o’clock. She needed to be back at the airport for the first leg of her new shift by six. Diana considered calling in sick, but there had been a run of last minute cancellations due to health on her part and she thought for the sake of appearances she better show up. She certainly didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize her job. Not now. Not when things were going so well for her and she had so much of her life together.

Outside her bedroom window children were playing in the courtyard. Happy, enthusiastic children, shrieking with energy. She wanted them all to die. She wanted them to fall down dead in mid-stride and just be quiet. She wished for the reaper to arrive and drive them into the earth so they would stop hurting her head. They didn’t know they were hurting her, but they were and that’s why their young lives needed to be cut short. “With up so floating many bells down.”

She did not sleep. She was too uncomfortable to sleep. So she studied the dark red mud behind her eyelids and listened to the hideous children playing tag or something. Go away. Go somewhere else. Go play in traffic.

She pushed herself up in bed and reached for the glass of Coca-Cola she brought from the kitchen. She took a sip and found it was not only room temperature but flat. It tasted sweet and soothing and she remembered how her mother always gave her flat Coke when she was sick. When she was sick as a child her mother would give her flat Coke and buttered toast cut in strips with the crusts taken off. And her mother would put a scarf over the lamp on her dresser in the room where she was a child. The lamp was meant to look like an old fashioned oil lamp with a white frosted chimney over which her mother draped a red and gold scarf that aged the light and turned it into something warm and antique as it went around the room.

She drank the last of the soda and put her head back on the pillow. At three o’clock she would start putting herself together. She would go downstairs and if there was any bread in the house she would make toast, butter it, cut it in strips and trim the crusts. And, depending on how she felt, she’d check on the vodka in the back of the freezer.

Chapter Twenty-seven

While Vivian Teller was saying Charley’s name, Vickie was listening to her mother’s car pulling out of the driveway and heading off to the library where she volunteered twice a week. Vickie had stayed in bed, offering fatigue as the reason she couldn’t come down for breakfast. Her mother said she understood, she was just happy to have her daughter home and they’d go The Olive Garden tonight and celebrate and catch up on everything.

When the sounds of her mother’s Toyota had faded, Vickie got out of bed, pulled on a pair of sweat-pants and a pair of running shoes and left her bedroom. She went to the far end of the hall and reached up to grab the length of rope attached to the base of the stairs leading up into the attic and pulled. There was a twangy complaint from the thick springs holding the stairs in place then that section of the ceiling folded down in front of her. She flipped the last few steps into position and then climbed up into the attic.

The attic of the house was an unfinished place of dark, orange wood and thick baffles of insulation, some held in place by sheet rock. It was a place of off season clothes and Christmas decorations, unfinished projects and the remains of childhood. The space smelled of camphor and dust.

Sunlight came through a circular window at the front of the house, but Vickie needed more light. She pulled the string attached to the chain attached to the switch of a bare hundred watt bulb hanging from a beam. Shadows were instantly everywhere.

She had a fair idea where the thing she was looking for could be found. She went to a run of garment bags, bulky plastic things like so many fat bats hanging from a pole set between two beams. She went through the bags, through the formals and comforters, the ski clothes and the extra blankets, until she found the bag she was looking for. She pushed the garment bags on either side away and twisted the one she wanted so the zipper faced her. Vickie opened the bag and reached inside. She reached past several items until she found the right hangers and pulled them out. Vickie took a step back and hooked the hanger around the edge of a beam.

She kicked off her shoes, pulled down her sweat-pants and stepped out of them. Then she crossed her arms, took hold of the hem of her t-shirt and pulled it off over her head. Then she reached for the first hanger, slipped the jacket off and set it aside so she could unbutton the shirt. She took the shirt off the hanger and slipped her arms into the sleeves.

It was voluminous on her. The tail of the shirt fell half-way down her thighs and her hands were lost above the cuffs. She buttoned the shirt, tugged up the sleeves and reached in for the trousers. She opened the French fly and held the pants in front of her.

Vickie lifted her right leg and slipped it into the trousers. They were too long and she had to pull the fabric up in order to get her right foot back on the ground. This done she lifted her left foot and stepped into that leg. She pulled the trousers up to her waist, tucked in the shirt and fastened the fly.

The pants started to slip off her hips. She grabbed the waistband and pulled them up. Then she fastened the belt and pulled it tight around her waist. It looked like there was as much belt left over as there was going around her.

Vickie took the tie from the hanger and put it around her neck. She fastened the top button of the shirt. The collar swam around her like the collar on something worn by a clown. She tied a serviceable 4-in hand and slid the knot snug against her throat.

She took the jacket from the top of the trunk where she’d set it aside and put her right arm through the right sleeve. There was much more jacket than their was Vickie.

Then she put her left arm into the left sleeve. She fastened the metal buttons and tugged at the hem of the jacket to make it fall straighter.

Vickie was not so much wearing her father’s uniform as she was enveloped by it. Her shape was lost in all the blue-gray material.

She shrugged down into the jacket and shirt like a turtle withdrawing into a shell. She could smell the sweet camphor but nothing else. No sense of sweat or anything left behind. Vickie folded her arms, hugging herself, hugging the uniform, hugging the uniform against herself, and closed her eyes. She felt the fabric against her legs, the mechanics of the French fly brushing her.

Sometime in the night, after the storm passed and she woke up and saw the moon, sometime after that she started thinking about the uniform. She thought about it up in the attic and how she wanted to see it. Then she started to think about what it would be like to put the uniform on. And the thought of that ran down her spine. Her reaction to the thought startled her, startled her to the point where she was suddenly afraid to go upstairs and look for the uniform. The uniform didn’t frighten her, it was the strength of her reaction to the idea of going up there and putting it on. Things were, she believed at the time, confusing enough. In this respect, she was wrong.

She slept a little after that, but not very deeply. She missed dawn itself and opened her eyes to a room full of sun and sounds of her mother in the bathroom and then getting dressed and coming along the hall and tapping on her door. Her mother came to her and they hugged and that’s when Vickie told her she was going to take a pass on breakfast and her mother told her not to worry.

Her mother kissed her and went downstairs.

For the next forty minutes Vickie stayed in bed, turned on her side, hugging her pillow and listening to the sounds coming up to her from the first floor of the house where her mother made several phone calls, listen to NPR on the kitchen radio, went out the back door to move the recycling bins and then came up to say goodbye to her daughter.

Alone in the attic, Vickie released her hug and leaned over at the waist. The clothes enveloping her shifted and she felt her nipples brushing against the inside of her father’s shirt. Vickie was very unsure about where this was all going.

She looked down at her feet, at her bare toes peeking out from the billowing pants. She wiggled her toes. Then she straightened up and reached into the garment bag for her father’s cap, which was in a separate plastic bag. She took the cap out of the bag. It was much more substantial than she was expecting it to be. It was wool with a leather brim and a satin lining. There was a metal emblem on the front showing a particularly aggressive looking American eagle.

Vickie took the cap by the sides and lifted it over her head then slowly lowered it. It dropped down over her eyes.

“This must have been how the wicked witch of the west felt when she started to melt.”

She pushed the cap back and looked around for a mirror. There was none in the attic. Gathering up the oversized pants as if she were gathering a skirt, Vickie moved to the steps. She was going to go downstairs and look at herself in the mirrors attached to the sliding doors of the closet in her old room.

The wool of the pants was rough against her legs and the cap kept slipping forward covering her eyes. The clothes were swallowing her up, consuming her.

She got to the top of the stairs, turned and started down backwards.

She didn’t know where the sense of wickedness was coming from. The tingle of being alone in the house and dressing up. It was like a thrill of childhood, but she knew there was really nothing childish about why she’d gone up to the attic and put on the uniform. Something had come undone somewhere inside her, or rather something had come together and she was trying to figure out if it meant anything.

Suppose it did? What the hell would she be able to do about it?

Reaching the bottom of the stairs the cap dropped over her eyes again as she turned toward the hallway. She stopped and lifted the cap. That’s when she saw Rory standing in the hallway looking at her in her father’s army uniform.

Chapter Twenty-six

Earlier that morning, after having walked the dog she rescued around the neighborhood and consequently had her first experience with picking up after a pet with a plastic grocery bag, Vivian Teller returned to her apartment and tried to find ways not to call the man she knew who worked in cargo at the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport. But by the time Mr. Barbicane was checking out of the Hyatt Regency she realized there was no point in putting off the inevitable. With the poodle stretched out in front of her on the living room carpet, Vivian made the call.

Her friend came to the phone and when she asked him about any dogs being transferred through the airport the previous night he told her the story of the five octave cross strung harp falling on a dog’s crate and the animal’s subsequent escape. Vivian’s heart sank; her orphan was no longer an orphan.

She asked her friend if the owners had been contacted. He snorted and said he’d made the call himself, not that he wanted to be the one to tell them their beloved pet was lost, but the thing had happened on his shift and he was responsible, so he made the call. The people in Orlando didn’t seem too put out by the disappearance of the dog. They hadn’t even gone to the airport to meet the flight when it was scheduled to arrive; they figured they’d get the dog the next day sometime.

Vivian’s friend told the people in Orlando that he would talk to airport security and the local animal control office in the hope of finding the dog. That’s when the people in Orlando asked if there was going to be any charge for that because if it was going to cost any money to look for the dog, they’d just as soon forget about the whole thing. It’s not like it was their dog. It had belonged to a distant relative who died. They didn’t really know her and she certainly didn’t leave any money to take care of the animal. They were just sort of talked into taking the dog as a favor since none of the relative’s friends could keep him, but if he’s gone, well, then he’s gone.

When Vivian’s friend in cargo hung up the phone with those people he thought to himself, “I don’t know where that mutt is, but I don’t think he’d be any happier in Orlando.”

Vivian’s friend asked her why she was asking about the dog. Had she seen him? Vivian thought about lying, but there didn’t seem to be much point to that so she told her friend how she found the dog and how he was with her in the apartment.

“Lucky pooch,” is what her friend said. Then there was a pause on his side of the line and he asked her if she wanted him to call the people in Orlando and tell them they’d found the dog.

The dog didn’t belong to her. She had no right to keep him and if she told her friend not to call the people in Orlando that would make him an accomplice or something. After all, the dog did belong to an airline customer and her job was to satisfy airline customers, not steal their property.

“Do you have to call them?” she asked.

Vivian listened for his answer. For several seconds all she heard were the sounds of cargo being moved around on forklifts inside the cavernous freight facility. Finally:

“I think I’ll wait and see if they call me back.”

In this fashion the decision was taken away from Vivian.

She told her friend in cargo that sounded like a good idea. They were just about to hang up when Vivian thought to ask if the dog’s name was mentioned anywhere on the shipping paperwork. Her friend told her to hang on a minute. She could hear him flipping through the pages of the manifest. Then he came back on the line and told her that the dog’s name was Charley. Vivian thanked her friend and said she owed him lunch. He said they should make it dinner and she said, why not?

Vivian Teller hung up the phone and looked at the dog in front of her. He was on his stomach, his jaw resting on the floor, fore legs stretched out in front of him. It took Vivian the better part of a minute to work up the nerve to clear her throat and say to the dog:

“Charley?”

The dog, who had not heard that word in quite sometime and who associated it with such things as food, walking, treats, ear scratches, belly rubs, and running around after things, lifted his head and looked at Vivian. Vivian smiled at the dog.

“Hello, Charley,” she said.

Chapter Twenty-five

Mr. Barbicane looked at his breakfast consisting of scrambled eggs, four slices of crisp bacon, a toasted English muffin with an assortment of jams and jellies and felt ill at ease. His state of vague dissatisfaction came not from the food in front of him, but from the experience he had in the bathroom shortly after stepping out of his shower. An experience he found difficult to explain and impossible to shake.

He had turned off the water, stepped out of the shower and had begun to dry himself with the white hotel towel. The room was cloudy after the shower and the expanse of mirror over the vanity was a vague, misty square through which Mr. Barbicane could make out his movements across the bathroom. He wrapped the towel around his waist and moved to the sink in preparation to brush his teeth. Reaching for his toothbrush inside his travel kit he noticed the hot water had loosened the band-aide around his index finger. Mr. Barbicane pinched the exposed edge of the bandage between his fingernails and pulled it off his finger. Underneath he found his skin pale, the thin slice of the cut still visible.

And in that moment something from his forgotten dream bubbled up inside him. It was unable to bring Mr. Barbicane any of the specific, albeit unorthodox, narrative of the drive, the cemetery, the coffin, the fall down the hill and the rest of it, but it was able to communicate some of the unformed sadness, the despair the dreaming Mr. Barbicane experienced upon seeing the flesh under the band-aide. The waking Mr. Barbicane now felt surprised by a welling up of inconsolable loss, somehow triggered by the sight of his wounded finger. He had a sense that something had happened to him, that he had experienced something, something he couldn’t reconstruct, but something that had dissembled him in a basic and irreparable way. He stood there in the bathroom, staring at his finger trying to remember. The towel came lose from his waist and dropped to the floor. Mr. Barbicane didn’t notice. He just stood there, naked, looking at his finger, trying to understand, trying to figure out why he felt so suddenly empty. He stood there for what felt to him a very long time, then he left the bathroom, dressed quickly and dashed out of the hotel room, as if to leave the dark feelings behind.

But the feelings came with him. They rode down to the lobby with him in the elevator and walked past the reception desk and into the bright restaurant with its picture windows offering the panorama of parking lot and access roads. A waitress named Claudine took his order although he felt no appetite.

Mr. Barbicane looked around the room and saw perhaps fifteen other people, some in couples, most sitting alone over their breakfasts and coffees, some with newspapers, some with laptops already open and ready for business. Among this number was Lloyd Barton who, like Mr. Barbicane, scanned the others in the restaurant.

Although he didn’t know it, Mr. Barton was looking for Mr. Barbicane, in that he was trying to guess if the person who made the passionate noise in the room next to him was in the dining room. He was looking for men with a particularly satisfied look on their faces, so when he saw the distracted expression on Mr. Barbicane’s face he immediately checked him off the list of possibilities and continued to search the room.

Claudine returned with Mr. Barbicane’s breakfast along with complimentary hot coffee and Mr. Barbicane was pleasantly surprised to find the aroma of the food brought back his appetite. He started to eat, all the while still plucked by the indefinable experience he’d had in the bathroom.

Eventually he chalked it up to the wistfulness of the journey winding down. He would finish breakfast, go up to his room, pack, check out, then pick up his rental car and head east. Once the rental car contract was signed the only part of the trip left (before the return loop) would be checking into the motel close to where he was expected.

In a few hours he would arrive at his final destination, a place where things would be expected of him, things more complex than his compliance with federal regulation as regards to tampering with lavatory smoke detectors during flight.

By the time he finished his meal he had almost convinced himself that the sadness he felt, although sadness did nothing to indicate the scale of what he’d felt, was related to nothing more than approaching a journey’s end.

And really, there was the return to look forward to. Another trip altogether! All the steps needed to take him back to his car patiently parked by the runway in Burbank. There would be business to take care of, matters that needed his attention, duties to fulfill, but they could be dealt with more easily if he stayed focused on the comforting fact that at the end he would once again take on the mantle of passenger, that he would be able to drop back into that blissful status of no longer being a person, but of being simply a confirmation number.

He tried to convince himself that such positive thoughts had braced him enough for the tasks of the day.

With breakfast finished he returned to his room and prepared to leave. He had taken little out of his suitcase except the fresh clothes he was wearing and his travel kit. Yesterday’s shirt and underwear were placed in one of the hotel’s laundry bags and tucked into a corner of the case. He folded his jacket and pants and placed them in the bag along with his kit. He then closed his suitcase. Mr. Barbicane put the unopened can of Diet Coke in the outer pocket of the case then sat on the edge of the bed to finish the ice tea he’d opened earlier.

According to the clock radio it was 10:43 A.M., more than an hour before check out time. Mr. Barbicane intended to leave once he finished his tea so he was in no danger of overstaying his reservation.

His tea finished, Mr. Barbicane used the bathroom one last time, washed his hands, then made a final check of the room, looking in closets he had not previously opened, checking drawers he had not used, as if his possessions might have unpacked themselves and hidden in the room during the night or while he was downstairs having breakfast. There was nothing of his in the closets or the drawers. No one would ever know Mr. Barbicane had been there.

Mr. Barbicane took hold of the handle of his ruthlessly practical rolling carry on bag and went to the door. He opened it, stepped into the hallway and paused to look back into the room, back into all that comforting uniformity, all that undemanding anonymity. It called to him. It offered protection. And he longed to answer that call.

But he had miles to go before he would sleep again in another room so similar, but not the same room. Never the same room again.

He pulled his bag across the threshold, let the door close and was moving down the carpeted hallway when he heard the door sigh shut and click behind him.

There was, as Mr. Barbicane expected, a different Hyatt employee at the desk when he stopped there to check out. He handed his plastic key card to the young woman. This was now a symbolic act, the returning of the key. The information that made the card a key, that communicated with the sensors in the individual door locks, was all stored on the magnetic strip on the back of the card. When Mr. Barbicane checked in, the key became his key when it was passed through a special machine the size of an electric pencil sharpener and sitting on the reception desk. Since the hotel computer knew when Mr. Barbicane was supposed to leave, the information on his key was set to expire at the appropriate moment. After that the key card would be useless. It would not open the door to the room that had been Mr. Barbicane’s, or the room next to his, which was still occupied by Mr. Barton, or any other door in the building. So it really didn’t matter if Mr. Barbicane returned his key or forgot to return it or simply kept it as a souvenir; it would no longer be a key.

Still, Mr. Barbicane returned the key card. The young woman checking him out of the hotel opened a drawer in the counter in front of her and tossed the card into the confusions of other such cards waiting to be re-coded and returned to usefulness.

Once keys in hotels were made of metal. They were usually attached to plastic fobs, usually in the shape of a distended diamond. Before they were made of plastic they were made of pressed cellulose or bakelite or metal or in some cases wood. They would have the name of the hotel embossed on them in some way as well as the number of the room to which they would permit access.

You carried these keys around in your pocket while you were visiting an unfamiliar city. It would take up space in your pocket, this awkward shape clicking up against your own keys, keys to things you were far away from. They served to remind you that, stranger though you might be, you had a place in this city. A very specific space. Not only an address, but a room location.

Now hotel room keys do their best to help you remain anonymous in a different city. The intention, at least in part, is to keep you safe: If you lost one of the old style keys the finder would have immediate access to your room and any belongings you might have left behind when you exited in the morning to attend an important meeting or perhaps just to see the sights. But these blank pieces of plastic, while they may reveal your choice of hotel, would be mute as to the place in that building where your toothbrush was.

A copy of Mr. Barbicane’s bill was printed and handed to him for examination and approval. He had not used room service nor made any local calls. He had paid cash at the restaurant when he had breakfast and had no use for any additional services such as dry cleaning or in room massage from an employee of the hotel’s fitness center. So there was nothing on his bill except the charge for his single night’s stay and applicable taxes.

He told the young woman the bill was in order and, yes, he would like to leave the charges on the same credit card he had used when he arrived. Mr. Barbicane signed the credit card form and the bill and was given copies of each, which he took, folded and placed in his pocket. He then turned and left the hotel, crossing the lobby and going up the ramp to the moving walkway waiting to carry him back to the terminal.

Sun poured down on Mr. Barbicane as the endless rubber tread of the walkway pulled him toward the terminal. It came down on him from the glass ceiling of the structure containing the walkway and reminded Mr. Barbicane of how long he’d been in the travel tunnel.

He stepped off the walkway at the terminal end and went downstairs to the level where various forms of ground transportation were arranged. There he found the counter for the rental car agency he had chosen for his needs and began a process very similar to the one used to check into the hotel, but in this instance also requiring the presentation by Mr. Barbicane of his driver’s license.

The transaction went smoothly and Mr. Barbicane was handed a folder containing his rental contract, a useful area map, and the keys to a 2006 Ford Fusion. He was told he would find the car that fit the keys in the rental car agencies special parking area directly across from the main entrance to the terminal. He would find the way clearly indicated by signs incorporating the rental agency’s logo and corporate colors.

Mr. Barbicane thanked the agent, who was male, aged twenty-six and named Brett, took the folder and his suitcase and went to the automatic doors of the terminal.

The doors opened ahead of Mr. Barbicane who stepped out into the real world for the first time since he entered the travel tunnel by boarding the first MD-87 in Burbank. He was immediately aware of the difference, of how the air smelled and moved, how the light was different, how, in spite of the municipal architecture all around him, unstructured it all felt. And there was more sound. It was disturbing and disappointing after such an extended period of living in a controlled environment.

Mr. Barbicane pushed on. He went to the curb and obeyed the traffic signal, which helped him cross the access road and enter the parking structure on the other side. There he found that the signage he had been promised would help him locate his car was in fact as helpful and clear as he had been led to believe.

In a matter of moments he located the parking slot the number of which corresponded to the number printed on his rental folder form with a Sharpie by young Brett. The slot contained a cherry red Ford Fusion, a mid-size sedan with more chrome accents than any other car in its class based on the amount of standard and available exterior chrome accents in a mid-size sedan.

The Fusion has a Duratec 2.3 liter, 16 valve I4 engine capable of delivering one hundred and sixty horsepower (at six thousand two hundred and fifty revolutions per minute) with an Environmental Protection Agency fuel rating of twenty-three miles per gallon for city driving and thirty-one miles per gallon when driving on the open highway. The automobile Mr. Barbicane was renting had direct acting mechanical bucket valve lifters and a sequential multi-port electronic fuel injection system. It had a double balljoint SLA front suspension and a multilink independent rear suspension that employed stabilizer bars for increased comfort and control. Mr. Barbicane had accepted the car with a full tank of gas and was expected to return the car with the same amount of fuel as when he left.

Mr. Barbicane pulled on the handle of the driver’s door and found it unlocked as was the rear passenger door, which he opened in order to put his bag on the back seat. Then he folded himself behind the steering wheel, closed the driver’s door, put the key in the ignition, and started the car.

He was instantly assaulted by a chest pounding blast coming from the sedan’s Premium Sound System with in-dash six-disc CD/MP3 changer. Mr. Barbicane desperately searched the dashboard for the sound system’s controls while Between Me and You performed by Ja Rule (born Jeffery Atkins in Hollis, Queens on February 29, 1976) with guest vocals by Christina Milian, one of the hits of his second album, Rule 3:36, assaulted his senses. He found the volume and turned it down. This did not help his appreciation of the music and he turned the system off completely. He’d worry about selecting alternative radio stations once he’d driven off airport property.

Mr. Barbicane buckled his seatbelt, adjusted the side-view and rear-view mirrors as well as the angle of the steering wheel, then pulled the car into drive and started to follow the arrows painted on the floor of the garage which he was promised would take him out of the parking structure.

There was a brief inspection of his rental agreement by a uniformed guard at a gate guarding the exit from the parking structure. The guard checked the stated level of the gas tank against the level shown on the dashboard gauge then handed the rental agreement folder back to Mr. Barbicane and pushed a concealed button inside his small toll-booth of a guard station thus opening the gate and permitting Mr. Barbicane to leave the parking structure.

He drove the sedan out of the parking structure and into the Pennsylvania morning. For the first time in more than twenty-four hours, Mr. Barbicane was at the wheel and in command. He watched the signage on the airport loop road carefully and merged onto Route 60 South.

He switched to I-79 south in order to bypass Pittsburgh proper. This choice lengthened the actually mileage of the last leg of Mr. Barbicane’s trip, but it would permit him to complete it in less time. He drove south through Collier and South Fayette where he decided to try the radio again.

Mr. Barbicane touched the on-off button tentatively.

A voice on the radio told him:

You niggaz got me fucked up, it's time to go to war
Nigga so what's up, I bust up, any muh'fucker feelin he rougher
I can't get enough of, showin niggaz what time it is
Go inside his crib, find his kids 'til we find the shit
Go ahead and keep buyin shit, act like you run the town
On the worst day, your birthday, that's when I cut you down.

Mr. Barbicane stabbed the scan button on the tuner, silencing Young Buck and Rizin Sun. The radio then set about the orderly task of shifting through the available stations, stopping each time it found a strong enough signal and giving Mr. Barbicane several seconds to decide if this was a station he would like to listen to. If so, he would push the scan button again and the radio would stay tuned to the selected frequency. If not, the radio would go on to the next signal in the spectrum.

In this way Mr. Barbicane heard the local radio market in a series of arbitrary snapshots; snatches of songs and commercials and commentators. The brief stops usually contained no real information leaving Mr. Barbicane to decided based on a tone of voice more than what the voice might be saying, on the energy of a song instead of its lyrical content.

Nothing caught Mr. Barbicane’s ear and he left the radio on scan for several minutes before he turned the machine off and drove on with nothing but the sound of the car and the highway as company.

The countryside Mr. Barbicane drove through was once a whispering forest of oak and hickory, birch and sugar maple, black cherry and hemlock, home to Elk and Whitetail Deer. Now flat boxy buildings crowded the near horizons of the valleys he drove through. This was now a place of light industry and discount saving centers.

We are so used to seeing so much of our country looking like this that it seems natural, as if the six lane highways were always there and then someone came along and merely added the stores, the E-Z On and Off gas stations and the McDonald’s with their sin absorbing Big Macs.

Mr. Barbicane drove on, past Houston and Chartiers to South Strabane where he transitioned to the east bound 70. Now the industrial parks and shopping centers started to fall away and he was driving through what was once farmland.

He was getting closer. This fact did not produce happy anticipation, but rather created a sense of foreboding buried in his stomach, like the early signs of the phantom pain he was so afraid would some day fell him in a hotel room a thousand miles from home.

Past the cut offs for Bealsville and Fallowfield, on through Allenport and Dunlevy heading for Rostraver and New Stanton. And with every passing mile the discomfort grew until he noticed that it had ceased to be like the phantom pain, and was becoming the pain, the actual suffering he so dreaded. He realized he was hunched forward in the driver’s seat, almost doubled over the steering wheel as he drove. It felt like something was twisting inside him, turning on itself, knotting itself somehow.

It had come for him, not in the comfort of a hotel room or an airplane, but behind the steering wheel of a rented Ford, rappers spewing obscenities from the stereo speakers all around him. And he was so close to where he was going, so close to where he was ultimately expected.

He would push on. He would make the effort, find some reserve of untapped inner strength and complete his journey.

It was at that moment of fortitude and self-determination when Mr. Barbicane saw the farm stand.

It was a large, long, open sided shed sort of building with rows of produce and a large display of sweet corn and gallon jugs of cloudy apple cider placed close to the roadside. There were hand painted signs announcing the availability of Jams and Jellies and Candy Apples as well as Pumpkins. And in front of the establishment, right at the edge of the road, was a big Franklin stove painted red, clearly connected to nothing. There was a jug of cider on top of the stove, an additional indication that this was not an operating stove, but one used as some sort of rustic advertisement.

Mr. Barbicane was staring at the Franklin stove when his tires started drifting onto the shoulder of the road.

Chapter Twenty-four

When the clock radio snapped on at 8:30 A.M. with Gary Wright singing “Dream Weaver,” Mr. Barbicane awoke with no memory of his nightmare. He had entered three additional periods of REM sleep following the episode in the cemetery and all memory of the previous dreams had evaporated long before he pulled back the covers and sat on the edge of the bed in contemplation of the day ahead.

He stood, went to the window and opened the drapes to look out at an almost empty parking lot, shadowless under an overcast sky. His time as a traveler was diminishing. He knew this, but there was nothing he could do about it.

Mr. Barbicane pulled the curtains and drapes completely opened and let the vague gray light into his room. Then he went to the dresser where he’d left the ice bucket. He lifted the lid and found the plastic bucket filled with cold water and the few transparent shards of ice. Mr. Barbicane dipped his hand into the water and scooped up the ice. The water was painfully cold against his skin. He dropped the ice in one of the glasses on the tray then took the can of iced tea from the mini bar, opened it and poured some over the ice.

Sipping the tea he walked from the bedroom to the bathroom where he turned on the lights surrounding the vanity mirror, put down the glass at the edge of the sink then went to the shower. He pushed the door to one side and reached in to start the flow of water from the tub faucet. He put the same hand he’d used to scoop the ice from the bucket under the flow of water into the tub. His fingers were so cold that the warm water felt like it was scalding his fingers. Mr. Barbicane pulled his hand away and looked at it. Then he used his other hand to judge the temperature of the water. When it arrived at a comfortable point he pulled the bit of metal jutting out of the faucet. This redirected the flow of water and in a moment there was a gurgling sound above his head and the water shot out of the small, adjustable shower head.

Mr. Barbicane stepped back, pulled his t-shirt off over his head, pulled down and removed his boxer shorts and stepped into the shower, sliding the door shut after him. He turned his face to the spray from the shower head and closed his eyes as the water brought him the rest of the way to wakefulness.

He opened the small bar of soap he found in the niche cut in the wall of the shower stall and used it to lather his body. He rinsed the soap off then put his head under the shower to wet his hair. Lifting his head out of the water he turned to the niche again where he found and picked up a small bottle of shampoo. He half squeezed half shook its honey-like contents into his hand then, after setting aside the bottle, lifted his hands to the top of his head and started to wash his hair. He closed his eyes during this procedure and could feel tendrils of lather crawling down his face, sliding down his forehead and along the left side of his nose. He felt the lather touch the inside corner of his left eye and a moment, a surprisingly long moment, later, felt the sting of the shampoo in his eye and squeezed both eyes tighter against the irritant.

Once he felt he had done a satisfactory job of washing his hair, Mr. Barbicane leaned his head under the showerhead again and rinsed out the lather, making sure to wash his face again to avoid additional irritation to his eyes. This done he opened his eyes and straightened up, pushing his wet hair back along the top of his head.

Mr. Barbicane considered using the small bottle of post-shampoo hair conditioner he found in the shower, but decided against doing so.

He turned his back to the showerhead and backed up into the flow until it was striking him at the back of his neck. He closed his eyes and savored the water and the heat.

There were, at that moment, seventy-five other guests at the Hyatt Regency taking showers. And in her bathroom in her apartment in Cranberry Township north of Pittsburgh, Diana stood in her shower, leaning forward, her hands on either side of the wall with the showerhead, letting the water strike her head. Her hair fell around her face, pulled down by the weight of the water that streamed off her head. Her head was a source of great pain. In particular, the area behind her right eye, which seemed to be the primary focus of her hangover’s attention.

She woke at almost the same moment as Mr. Barbicane and looked around to find that while she had gotten home, she had not succeeded in either getting undressed or reaching her bedroom. Diana had opened her eyes and recognized the fabric of her sofa. She turned over to see the living room with the lights on and the t.v. playing with the sound off. On the television screen a handful of men and women were trying to escape from a large mechanical man with an implacable screen where his face should have been. The people and the mechanical man were in black and white.

Diana had no specific memory of arriving home, parking her car, coming up from the garage, unlocking her front door, coming into the apartment, turning on the lights and the television and sitting down on the sofa. At her feet were the remains of the package of Pepperidge Farm cookies, but no sign of either the lotto ticket, the milk, or the bottle of vodka she bought when she left the airport. But the important thing was that she was where she was supposed to be and not somewhere else. That would make things easier.

She was, however, not feeling well. Her head was pounding and she felt as if something was trying to push her right eye from inside her skull, trying to push it completely out of the socket. She put her right hand over her eye as if to hold it in as she stood up. This only made the pain more intense, synchronizing the pounding with the beating of her heart.

Reaching out in front of her with her left hand, Diana made careful progress across the living room and down the hall to her bedroom and bathroom. She passed her flight bag by the door and was glad to see it had made it from the car with her. In the bedroom she closed her eyes and the darkness made her dizzy. So, she squinted out at her bedroom, at her still made bed, and undressed. She leaned down to take off her stockings and fell back across the bed. She felt sweat suddenly pour from her skin and knew she was seconds away from being violently ill.

Diana rolled off the bed and, still in her skirt and stockings, pitched herself toward the bathroom where she found the toilet and relieved herself of much yellow bile. It was one of those great contractions, one of those times of illness when you feel the crushing hand of a giant squeezing the life out of you, squeezing you like a tube of toothpaste.

She felt incrementally better after throwing up, took off the rest of her clothes and got into the shower. She turned the water up to its maximum pressure and let it beat on her head. She slowly turned under the water, letting it cross her shoulders and neck. Then she leaned forward again, pressing her hands on the walls of the shower to keep herself in place and let the water have at her head. She closed her eyes and tried to breath which is when she realized how stuffed up her nose felt.

Diana put her hand to her face, squeezed the bridge of her nose then touched the nostrils with one finger tip. She opened her eye and looked at her fingertip and saw that it was red. She touched her nostrils again and the finger came away redder than before.

Her nose was not bleeding at that moment, rather the hot water was reaching the dried blood plugging her nostril and rehydrating it.

Diana brushed the back of her hand under her nose and looked at the red streak this motion left on her skin. She assumed that whatever had happened to cause the nosebleed had happened since she fell asleep, or more accurately passed out, on her sofa. This was not the case.

Outside Diana’s apartment, forming a subtle trail to her front door, was a series of small brown drops, the dried residue of blood that had dripped from her nose between the time she got out of her car and the time she reached her threshold. There was a larger drop of blood on floor of the garage next to the driver’s door of Diana’s car. There was also blood in the car, on the gear-shift and turn-signal levers, the door handle, the center armrest and on the upper part of the steering wheel the impact with which was the source of Diana’s injury. She struck her face against the top of the steering wheel when she went over a curb on her way home. The impact was not sufficient to set of the deceleration sensors responsible for firing the air bag system so Diana was able to continue on her way, once she got the car off the lawn and back onto the street again.

As Diana stood in the shower dripping water and old blood, her car rested in the garage dripping bright green anti-freeze from the holes she ripped in her radiator when she drove over the ornamental statuary of the small Mexican man with his burro and cart loaded with flowers. There was now a crease along much of the passenger’s side where the car side-swiped a row of garbage cans a block away from the apartment building. And pressed into the treads of the right rear tire was a strange, gray snakelike thing which at first might appeared to be the remains of a tremendous worm but was actually the severed tail of a possum, or more accurately a Virginia Opossum (Didelphis virginiana) the only marsupial found in North America, that had been exploring the garbage cans at the time of impact. Injured and furious, the animal escaped and survived.

The empty bottle of Stoli was under the car along with the lotto ticket, which was worth $360,000 to anyone who might find it and wanted to go to the trouble of checking the numbers.

Chapter Twenty-three

The sounds Mr. Barbicane made were not restricted to his dream. They escaped into the real world as he slept in his bed in the room at the Hyatt Regency hotel at Pittsburgh International Airport. His moan and his groan were startlingly load and while they were not loud enough to wake Mr. Barbicane they were loud enough to be heard through the wall to which the headboard of his bed was bolted.

The sounds of Mr. Barbicane’s distress were heard in the room next to him by a thirty-six-year old man named Lloyd Barton, an engineer for Rocketdyne Corporation, a major NASA contractor and at one time a company owned by the Boeing Corporation, builders of the MD-87 aircraft that had transported Mr. Barbicane from Burbank to Pittsburgh. Rocketdyne is no longer part of the Boeing family, having been acquired in 2005 by United Technologies Corporation where it was combined with the Pratt & Whitney Space Propulsion Division, the resulting corporate entity to be known as Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne.

Mr. Barton was not asleep at the time, but was sitting up in bed going over the specifications of a new dual-mode scramjet which allows an engine to function as a subsonic combustion ramjet at low supersonic speeds, say between Mach 3 and Mach 5, and as a supersonic combustion ramjet at high supersonic speeds, those speeds greater than Mach 5.

To Mr. Barton, Mr. Barbicane’s sounds did not sound like the sounds of someone in emotional pain. Mr. Barton mistook the sounds for the sounds of pleasure and assumed someone was having sexual intercourse in the room next to his.

He set down his papers and turned his head slightly, angling his ear to the wall to hear any subsequent sounds. There were none forthcoming. He sat there. Listening. Poised.

Mr. Barton imagined sex was taking place behind his back. He imagined a man and woman on the other side of the wall. And as he waited to hear more audible evidence of their activities he imagined who they were and how they got there.

He imagined a male traveler, not unlike himself, in the bar of the hotel, just off the lobby. He has returned from an afternoon and evening of meetings. He had dinner with co-workers but is too wound up from the day’s activities to simply go up to his room, so he has stopped at the bar for a cocktail, something to help him unwind.

He orders a drink and looks along the length of the bar and sees an astonishing woman. She is tall and voluptuous in a way that makes the man think of movie starlets from the 1960s. Her hair is a cascade of platinum. She wears a scandalously short canary yellow dress with a halter top that barely covers her prodigious breasts and reveals her arms and shoulders and most of her back. The dress is crocheted and there are glimpses of the woman’s flesh through the gaps in the pattern. She is wearing make-up worthy of a showgirl and sips a green martini through a straw to protect her carmine lips. In the dim bar the woman seems to give off light, a sort of sexual bioluminescence. She sits provocatively on a stool, her long legs deliberately crossed, her feet in yellow high-heel pumps the color of her dress.

This is not the sort of creature you see in the bar of the average Hyatt. She is breathtaking in her ability to embody so many male fantasies in one dramatically curved form.

The man is drawn to her. They speak. He buys her a drink. Even though he knows it’s against local law, Mr. Barton imagines the man lighting a cigarette for the woman. She takes the smoke deep into her and slowly releases it as though whistling it away through her moist lips.

Mr. Barton leans his head against the wall behind his bed and imagines the man and woman leaving the bar together. The man puts his arm around her waist and draws the woman against him. She presses her hip against his as they move to the elevator. He pushes the call button, she looks at herself in the mirror between the elevators and inspects her perfection.

The elevator comes. They step into the car and the doors close after them. They are the only ones on the elevator as it rises up into the hotel. She leans against the wall opposite the man so he can see her. He looks at her and as he looks at her she seems to change. Her hips grow more pronounced and her breasts appear to grow, straining against the canary yellow fabric and she makes a small moaning sound as if these changes bring her pleasure. Mr. Barton imagines these changes are linked directly to the desire of the businessman.

The elevator stops at the floor where Mr. Barton and Mr. Barbicane are staying and the two people get out and start down the hallway, past the sconces spaced for perfect illumination. He tells her to walk ahead of him, he wants to watch her ass. She smiles and steps ahead of him, rolling her hips as she walks. She feels his eyes on her and runs her hands along her contours for his enjoyment.

They reach the room next to Mr. Barton’s. The man opens the door for the woman and they step inside. The man turns on one light and stretches out on the bed. The woman stands at the foot of the bed in her canary yellow dress.

He asks her to walk back and forth at the foot of the bed. She does so, pacing back and forth, moving her hands along her breasts and hips and ass as she does so. She does this for quite sometime, apparently never tiring of putting herself on display in this fashion. Then the man swings his legs over the side of the bed and tells her to come to him. She does.

The woman kneels in front of the man and arches her back to present herself to him like some sort of exotic bird.. The man reaches forward and places an open hand on each of the woman’s breasts, pressing gently. The woman makes a purring, groaning sound that one might consider to be a disproportionate amount of response to the pleasure possibly derived from this touch, but it isn’t. Her head goes back, she closes her eyes and her lips part. She is lost in ecstasy and nothing moves for a moment. Then she lowers her head and opens her eyes, her carefully made-up eyes, and looks at the man with a combination of challenge and invitation. Then she reaches for the belt on the man’s trousers.

All this Mr. Barton imagines as prelude to the brief sounds he misinterpreted coming from Mr. Barbicane’s room. And all the while he is imagining these things, Mr. Barton projects himself into the extrapolated scenario. But, it must be noted, Mr. Barton imagined himself not as the businessman, but as the woman in the yellow dress.

Because throughout his life, ever since a crystallizing childhood moment in front of a television set watching an old movie, Lloyd Barton, a man who has helped peel back the outer layers of heaven itself, has had but one profound wish: To be Irma La Douce. To be the sort of woman who populates the full page cartoons of mid-sixties issues of “Playboy.” Mr. Barton dreams of being voluptuous.

He presses the side of his head against the wall separating him from the room of the now peacefully sleeping Mr. Barbicane and listens. He listens and dreams of being long of leg and ample of breast. Someone who in the morning will walk into the pre-dawn grayness with five hundred dollars cash for her work.

Mr. Barton has told no one of his desire to be transformed. And he never will. He will guard it as closely as Vickie will forever hold the secrets of her dream and for many of the same reasons.

Perhaps the fantasy is worse than the act. It’s certainly harder to control. You can stop yourself from taking action, that’s easy. But how do you stop yourself from dreaming?

Mr. Barton touches the wall with his fingertips and closes his eyes.

In Farmers Branch, Vickie opens her eyes to see that the storm has cleared and the moon has come out, full and blue. Her room is filled with moonlight. Dangerous moonlight.

If Vickie knew of Mr. Barton and his dream she might have told him to look for the stream where Salmacis embraced Hermaphroditus and how the water had been cursed in a way to make the engineer’s dream come true.

If man he entered, he may rise again
Supple, unsinewed, and but half a man!

But Vickie knew nothing of Lloyd Barton and he knew nothing of her.

Tired of waiting, Mr. Barton finally gave up the hope of hearing more sex from Mr. Barbicane’s room. He put his paperwork aside, turned out the light and stretched out under the covers and thought about what it would be like to be desired.

As Mr. Barton considered this, Vickie looked up through the dormer window of her bedroom and thought about a poem Ovid didn’t write.

I see the moon,
The Moon sees me
God bless the moon,
And God bless me.

Chapter Twenty-two

In his dream, Mr. Barbicane has already arrived at his destination. He is at the church with no memory of traveling there. He finds the church empty and doesn’t know if he’s late or early or if he has come to the wrong church because, in the dream, he doesn’t have his suitcase with all his information, his itinerary. There is no one in the church to ask.

In his dream, Mr. Barbicane walks across the street and goes into the funeral home and asks the man there if he knows where Mr. Barbicane is supposed to be and when he’s supposed to be there. The man tells Mr. Barbicane that there’s been a change of plans and the others have gone ahead, leaving the funeral parlor and going directly to the cemetery without going to the church. The church service has been canceled. No reason for this cancellation is offered and Mr. Barbicane doesn’t ask for one.

He needs to get to the cemetery and the man at the funeral parlor tells him to drive straight down the road just outside and he’ll see the cemetery on his right. Mr. Barbicane does not ask how he will find the people he’s looking for once he gets to the cemetery, he simply leaves, gets in his car and starts driving.

The rental car he is driving has no glass. It has no windshield, no rear window, no side windows. Wind blows into the car and makes it very difficult to drive. Normally, Mr. Barbicane would wonder what led him to except a car in this condition from the car rental company, but this is a dream and therefore beyond the usual challenge of logic.

The imperative that put Mr. Barbicane behind the wheel of a car with no windshield is the same irrefutable force that brought Vickie’s father back from the dead, which in turn resulted in her father and her boyfriend making out in the movie theatre while she grew a penis.

This is one of the ways dreams can be exceptionally cruel, how they can deprive us of context, logic and often our clothes. How they can drop us into ghastly situations and make us suffer pain and embarrassment and loss all for the sheer, perverse pleasure of watching us suffer.

But, really, we do it to ourselves, don’t we? Dreams. They’re supposed to be the random discharges of a sleeping brain that we try to forge into some kind of narrative, even if the narrative changes from moment to moment. All the terror and confusion we carry around in our own heads, ready to victimize us, waiting for the chance to torture us, waiting for us to be at our most vulnerable, waiting for us to fall asleep.

Mr. Barbicane squints into the wind as he drives down the road. Up ahead he sees the beginning of the cemetery fence and presses harder on the gas pedal, trying to look ahead, trying to locate the gate so he can get onto the cemetery grounds. He drives what seems a long time without seeing a gate.

The other side of the road does not seem to be moving past Mr. Barbicane at the same rate as the side with the fence. In fact, the other side, the driver’s side of the road, doesn’t seem to be moving at all. Over there, motionless, is a large farm stand. A large, long, open sided shed sort of a building with rows of produce and a large display of sweet corn and gallon jugs of cloudy apple cider close to the road. Signs announce JAMS AND JELLIES and CANDY APPLES and PUMPKINS and PICKLED GARLIC. There are barrels labeled CRACKERS, and a big Franklin stove painted red and connected to nothing, just standing there, at the entrance to the farm stand. There is a jug of cider on top of the stove, an additional indication that this was not an operating stove, but one used as some sort of rustic advertisement.

Behind the farm stand, and Mr. Barbicane was able to see behind the farm stand in his dream and it didn’t seem unusual that he could, was a small sort of carrousel. Not a carrousel with horses, but a round tank of water with some sort of carrousel apparatus at the center that pulled eight small boats around the tank in a counter clockwise circle. Each boat was big enough for two children. There was a length of rope from the seats to the bow of the boat which was attached to a brass bell that the child could ring as he or she imagined they were piloting the boat. The bottom and sides of the tank had been painted a dark blue to give the impression of an ocean. But the painting of the interior surfaces was done some time ago and the paint has flaked off in many areas, making the bottom of the tank look like a neglected fresco. All this Mr. Barbicane could see from his moving car as he drove along the side of the cemetery looking for the gate. He never questioned this peculiarly omniscient point of view.

There’s a little girl in one of the boats and she’s dropped something in the water and she’s very upset, but not one is paying attention to her. Mr. Barbicane wants the people standing around the farm stand and the boat ride to stop and listen and help the little girl. He knows the thing she’s dropped is a ring, but he doesn’t know how he knows that because he didn’t see her drop it. Then up ahead he sees the entrance to the cemetery and he’s already so late he has to push on. Her can not help the little girl.

Mr. Barbicane turns in at the entrance to the cemetery. He looks around and sees no one. He has no idea where he is supposed to go, how he is supposed to catch up with his family. But he doesn’t worry about this, he just drives deeper into the cemetery until he sees a row of black cars parked behind a hearse on one of the narrow roads winding through the headstones and crypts like little courthouses.

He parks behind the last car in the row and gets out of the car with no glass and looks around for the service. He sees people off in the distance, standing at the crest of a hill, about ten or twelve of them standing in a group. and he starts up the hill to reach them. He knows this is where he is supposed to be although he doesn’t know why he knows, nor does he question why he knows without knowing how he knows.

When he gets to the top of the hill he’s surprised to find that the casket is open. The people are standing around an open casket and they don’t seem to think it’s odd at all. He realizes the casket is very plain, a pine box actually. Like the coffins you see in old westerns. Like the sort of box they put you in before they take you up to old Boot Hill.

There is no fabric lining the casket, but there is a blanket and a pillow supporting the head of the woman in the casket. The woman in the casket does not look like she’s asleep. She looks like she’s made of wax. She looks to Mr. Barbicane the way she looked when they first met, when they were both in their twenties. She is younger, now that she is dead. Her eyes are closed and her hair is blonde again the way it used to be. She has high cheek bones and her lips are slightly parted like the lips of the young woman on the airplane listening to her iPod, and she wears lipstick the color of plums like the cabin attendant who brought Mr. Barbicane his filet mignon and later bought vodka to drink in the parking lot of the convenience store. Just something to get her home. Something she had earned.

The woman in the coffin is surprisingly casually dressed, in black jeans and a lime colored sweater with a floppy sort of open neck. Who picked out these clothes for her? Certainly this wasn’t what she would have chosen for herself. He wonders if it was too late to change her clothes so she could go to her grave in something more dignified. Then he realizes it really doesn’t matter. At that point, the lime colored sweater with the floppy sort of open neck would do as well for a shroud as anything else. Her hands are folded just below her breasts and she is holding a rosary, the small silver crucifix carefully placed against the back of her right hand. Her expression is not one of sleep or peace. She looks like she was preparing to sneeze. She does not look comfortable in this box, on this blanket, her head on this pillow. In death she does not look at all comfortable.

In the dream, Mr. Barbicane was not expecting to see this woman dead. He was unaware that it was her funeral to which he was traveling. In the waking world it would have been impossible, or at best highly unlikely, that Mr. Barbicane would go to a funeral without being aware of whose funeral it was. He is surprised to see her here, to see her young and dead and about to be buried.

In his dream Mr. Barbicane looks up from the pretty woman in the coffin and realizes everyone is looking at him. They say nothing, but he knows they hold him responsible for this. Something he did or failed to do led to this and everybody knows it.

And in the dream, somehow, Mr. Barbicane knows they’re right. He feels suddenly filled with guilt. Filled not in a metaphorical way, but a physical one. He feels engorged with guilt. He feels bloated with the foul stuff, packed with it, in his bowels, in his stomach, bubbling up through his esophagus, burning his throat.

He should have stayed where he was. He should never have left his house and come to this place. It wouldn’t have made any difference to her if he came or stayed, so really what had he accomplishing with all this traveling? He got to look in an open coffin which really shouldn’t have been open at the gravesite, and see what she looked like, see that she was dead with his own eyes, not that he had any doubts, not that he had known it was her funeral before he arrived and looked in the coffin.

They invited him without telling him who was to be buried, knowing he would not come if he knew the truth and now that he’s shown up they look at him like this. That is the moment Mr. Barbicane realizes that he has been tricked into coming. This was not consideration, this was punishment. He had been compelled to this place by a conspiracy of lies in order to be confronted by what he did and exposed to the world for his crimes.

He turns away from her, from the coffin, from the rest of them and starts down the hill, starts back to the car with no windshield, no glass at all. He is afraid to turn back, to look around, afraid they might be coming down the hill after him. He knows enough about how dreams worked that if he tried to run it would do him no good. Running never works in dreams.

But in spite of knowing this he starts walking faster. Or at first he thinks he’s walking faster then he realizes the hill is now much steeper than it was when he first walked up it to the grave and the coffin and the dead woman. It gets steeper as he walks, as if someone were tipping it up under his feet. He has to go faster in order to keep his balance. He is afraid in a moment he will fall and a second later he does trip and start to pitch forward, his hands going out in front of him and his whole body starting to twist to one side.

His hands hit the ground, the wet grass, and then his face. He gets the smell of dirt in his nose. He feels the friction of pebbles against the palms of his hands and he slides and falls and starts to roll down the hill.

Mr. Barbicane rolls down the hill. What he sees takes on the characteristics of what one might see looking out from a carrousel, a repeating loop of a landscape. There is the wet grass and dark almost muddy earth close to his eyes, then that arcs away and he is looking up the hill up at the grave and sees that the people up there aren’t chasing him, they’ve turned away from him, turned back to the pine box with the dead woman in it. Then the hill top is gone and everything is blue gray sky for an instant. Black branches slash through his field of vision. The trees multiply and the ground rushes up, but now he’s looking down the hill, down to the road where he can see the rental car behind the rest of the funeral cars. The ground pushes the cars away and again there’s nothing but wet grass and earth, then the top of the hill again, then the sky again, then the trees followed by more trees followed by the car and then the earth again. Mr. Barbicane is caught in the loop. With each rotation the people at the top of the hill get small and his car gets bigger until the last few orbits where the car looms bigger than the sky and he finally stops, hitting the side of his car, his head banging against the right rear tire. His head bounces of the tire and he drops down, wedging himself between the wheel and the curb.

Mr. Barbicane’s vision is swimming in a most disconcerting way. He tries to focus on something. He sees his hand on the plastic wheel cover and tries to focus on in. His hand is filthy from the hillside. Mr. Barbicane reaches up to the edge of the band-aide he put on his finger at the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport and pulls it off. The flesh underneath the band-aide is white and shriveled, cold and dead, like the inside of a fish. The line of the cut is still visible, like a thin red filament. It is if that little part of him had died and this was a preview of what was unavoidably ahead for him.

In his dream, Mr. Barbicane put his face down, pressing his eyes into the fabric of his charcoal gray suit jacket and makes a sound somewhere between a moan and a groan and then he proceeded to weep.

Chapter Twenty-one

Mr. Barbicane retired and turned off the bedside light. He had left the blackout drapes open so the amber ghost glow from the parking lot lights came through the sealed windows and gently filled the room. The only other lights were the red-dot of the smoke detector in the ceiling and the digits of the clock radio next to him. He was tired, but very satisfied with how the day had gone. And there was still more travel to come, at least two or three hours on the road the next day. But already there was a wistfulness about the endeavor.

This time tomorrow he will have arrived and it would be a week before he could leave, become again a passenger and start the transformative process all over again. The problem with going somewhere, he determined, was the unavoidable need to eventually arrive.

Still, he didn’t want thoughts like that to crush the pleasures yet to come. There was the feel of the unfamiliar sheets and an unfamiliar bed. There would be sounds in the morning and that moment of divine disorientation when you wake in a strange room and have to consciously recall the sequence of events that brought you to your foreign status and this alien bed. There would be a shower in a tub he’d never stood in before, getting dressed, repacking his bathroom items. Then breakfast in a hotel restaurant and checking out, settling the bill. Dave would probably not be on the desk when he left so he would get to interact with a different employee of the Hyatt Corporation. Then the moving walkway again, this time back to the terminal and the car rental desk where there would be more paperwork and the taking of a new credit card imprint.

Much pleasure awaited him before he had to arrive. He must concentrate of savoring each flavor as it comes and not let the destination sour the travel.

Mr. Barbicane turned over on his side, facing the clock radio. Looking at the night table he saw the red glow of the clock digits reflecting on an irregular yet polished surface at the edge of the table. He reached for the item and picking it up realized it was the candy left on his pillow by the staff. With a great sense of wickedness, Mr. Barbicane unwrapped the chocolate and took a bite. It was filled with orange cream. Delightful.

Mr. Barbicane savored his candy in the dark then settled back against the firm pillows. His mouth was still full of the taste of chocolate and orange cream as he fell asleep.

At the moment Mr. Barbicane was falling asleep, Vivian Teller was waking up, suddenly alarmed by the presence of a burglar in her apartment. Not only in her apartment, but in her bed with her. Someone had come into the apartment while she was asleep and climbed onto the bed next to her, pressing their body against her back as she slept on her side.

She was about to bolt from the bed when she heard the burglar growl in his sleep and realized it was the dog she had rescued. He must have gotten lonely in the kitchen and found his way to the bedroom of the apartment and climbed up on the bed to be with the woman who rescued him from the expressway.

Vivian turned over, the dog adjusting to her movements, and looked at him.

She had found a piece of clothesline in the apartment building garage and looped it through the dog’s collar for a leash then lead him up through the open courtyard, stopping the visit certain shrubs along the way, and up the stairs to the second floor balcony and finally to her front door. Vivian tied the clothesline to the doorknob and ran into the apartment to get some towels so she could try to dry the dog before she brought him inside. She got him from a stage of wetness to a condition of dampness and was surprised, as are all people unfamiliar with the breed, that a wet poodle smells better than any other sort of wet dog. Vivian, at this point, did not know the dog she snatched from the roadway was a poodle. She thought poodles were all, diminutive, yapping things. This rather dingy, but apparently well-tempered animal, looked more like some kind of retriever/sheep dog combination. He had deep brown eyes, ringed by tear stains, and a liver colored nose. He appeared none the worse for wear from his adventure.

Vivian brought the dog into her apartment, through the living room to the small kitchen where she debated about what to feed him and eventually offered him water in a mixing bowl and some shortbread cookies. One of the things that proves the existence of God is the sound of a large dog drinking water from a bowl.

When Vivian offered the first short bread cookie she did so tentatively, concerned that the dog might take it in his mind to grab a few fingers while he was at it. She was surprised by the dog’s reaction to the offered treat: He sat on the kitchen floor and extended his left paw. Vivian took his paw and shook it once then offered the cookie again. The dog tilted his head to one side, leaned in and gently closed his front teeth around the first third of the cookie and slid it out of her hand, like someone taking a cigarette from an offered pack. Vivian said the thing all dogs enjoy hearing, regardless of gender.

“Good boy.”

He finished the water in his bowl and Vivian refilled it. He seemed a very calm animal, curious about his surroundings but not apparently anxious about the circumstances that lead him there. The collar, the offered paw, this was obviously not a stray, but someone’s pet and the theory of him escaping from cargo at the airport seemed more and more likely to Vivian.

She told him to lay down and stay and was amazed that the dog did lay down and appeared to be staying as she backed out of the kitchen, turning off the overhead light, but leaving on the small light over the stove. Vivian then went upstairs, took a quick shower and climbed into bed where she was surprised to realize how tired she was.

The effort of running out onto the expressway, grabbing the dog and her stumbling retreat and fall were all starting to show up in her muscles. But she had saved a dog and that was worth a couple of Motrin anyway. Vivian fell asleep before she could summon the energy to get out of bed and take the pills.

Then, sometime during the early morning, she was joined by the dog who must have been accustomed to sleeping on his master’s bed. He was on his side, his spine pressed against her and his legs stretched out to the side. His front paws were casually crossed. As Vivian watched he adjust his position, first rolling over on his back exposing his high, surprisingly narrow chest, then completing the rotation to end up on his stomach, his nose tight against the blanket covering Vivian. Once settled, he opened his mouth and made a series of quiet clicking sort of smacking sounds. Then he sighed a sigh as eloquent as any Vivian had ever heard from any creature, man or beast.

Suddenly the thought of surrendering this animal to his owners broke Vivian’s heart. She had forgotten what it was like to have a dog and that previously unnoticed incompleteness now felt like a roughly cored void, a wound.

To have a dog as a child is one thing, to have a dog as an adult is something much more profound. The concept of loyalty and love, of being someone to whom another creature runs to and not from, children don’t think of these things. Just when we start needing those reassurances is usually when we lose our dogs. We have grown up and they have grown old. We are crushed by the lose, rendered worse than inconsolable by our inability to make our dying friend understand what is happening to him, what all this slowing down and stiffness means. “What is this thing in front of my eyes that keeps me from seeing you?” “Why can’t I hear you coming half a mile away anymore?” If we’re lucky they die in our arms, looking us in the eyes. They leave us behind and we stagger home, torn open and promising to never again love anything that might die before we do.

So, we move on, dogless for a time. The priorities of life and work get in the way and it sometimes takes years to understand what’s wrong and more years to do something about it. We need dogs so much more than dogs need us.

Vivian reached down and put her hand on the dog’s head. She stroked this head and his ear and along his snout and felt her own breathing calm in her breast, her sore muscles forgetting their complaints.

“Good Boy.”

There were things in the world Vivian could never grasp. She remembered reading an article in the newspaper about certain Islamic teachings concerning dogs. How dogs are considered unclean by some Islamic teachers who warn that Muslims licked by a dog must perform purification rituals. Muslims are taught that anything a dog touches must be washed seven times, the final time in dust. They are taught from an early age that even images of dogs or dog-shaped toys were sufficiently unclean that purification was required after touching them. One man was advised by his spiritual leader that his pet dog was evil and should be driven away by cutting off its food and water. Most disturbing to Vivian was the article’s mention of a tradition that held if a dog passed in front of someone preparing to pray, the dog would so taint the purity of the moment that the prayers would be meaningless. The suggestion being that God turned away from dogs!

Vivian could not understand what sort of faith could cast dogs in such a terrible light.

Vivian was unaware that not all Muslims share this opinion of dogs. Bedouin’s feel very differently about their Salukis. Salukis are allowed in the tents and are treated as close companions, as gifts of Allah to the children. But the Bedouins were not mentioned in the article Vivian read because it had been written by a hateful man who wanted to do what he could to demonize the enemies of the United States in the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The man himself didn’t like dogs. The man preferred cats.

Tomorrow Vivian would call someone she knew in cargo. The dog might be reunited with his owners before the end of the day. If not, he would stay with Vivian until such time as the reunion could be arranged. Unless, of course, the dog had not escaped from cargo, that his presence on the road near the airport was just a coincidence. In which case, well, she’d just have to take care of him herself. She had rescued him and now he was her responsibility. She’d just have to live with that.

The dog, who answered to the name of Charley, knew nothing of the religious prejudices against him. He was grateful for the water and the bed and the cookies and to not have to deal with cars which, frankly, he neither understood nor appreciated. He was named Charley by the woman who cared for him throughout the first seven years of his life and who had died the previous month after suffering for more than three years with recurring anaplastic astrocytoma brain tumors. Her name was Ruth.

Ruth left no instructions about what was to be done with Charley; she was afraid making such plans would guarantee her death. So when she died, Charley made the rounds of friends from Ruth’s office, but that hadn’t worked out. Finally, a distant relative was located and said they’d take the dog off their hands if they could ship him from Chickasha, Oklahoma to Orlando, Florida, which is how Charley came to be passing through the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport during the violent thunderstorms that suspended airport operations. During the transfer from one flight to another a case containing a five octave cross strung harp fell on Charley’s case and cracked it open. Charley ran from the airport into the stormy night where Vivian found him.

Ruth had named Charley after John Steinbeck’s poodle, but Steinbeck’s poodle had not been white. He was a “blue” Standard whose full name was Charles le Chien. The year before Steinbeck’s Charley died at the age of eleven, he went with the writer on a cross-country road trip, sharing the cab of a three-quarter ton pick-up truck Steinbeck named after Don Quixote’s horse, Rocinante. Ruth read “Travels with Charley” when she was in high school and had promised herself a poodle. It took her fifteen years to get one for herself, having to wait through a marriage to a man who didn’t like dogs and was, in fact, the author of the article about Islamic practices that so upset Vivian Teller.

Charley had known something was wrong with Ruth, he knew she was sick, but he didn’t know how sick. He had no idea where she was, but assumed she’d show up eventually if it was at all within her power to do so. Meanwhile, he was warm and dry and the woman from the car smelled nice and smiled and he didn’t get the sense that she was sick the way he sometimes sensed it from Ruth. He would deal with the situation with the patience of his kind. He would make himself comfortable and repay the woman’s kindness as best he could.

Chapter Twenty

Mr. Barbicane opened his suitcase and took out the travel-kit containing his razor, toothbrush and other toiletries. This he took into the bathroom and placed on the vanity next to the sink. The vanity ran the length of the room which was larger than many of the hotel bathrooms he’d seen. The wall above the sink was mirrored and reflected the shower behind him as he stood at the vanity. The shower had a sliding door of clear glass instead of some sort of opaque curtain. There was a coffee maker on a tray at one corner of the vanity, with foil packets of coffee, tea bags, sugar, artificial sweetener and powdered dairy-like substance called “Cremetta.” Above this was a wall mounted telephone and next to the telephone a hair dryer snapped into a plastic case.

Next to the sink was a small basket containing a face cloth and several small bottles of luxurious hair and skin care products Mr. Barbicane was welcome to use during his stay. Mr. Barbicane used the facilities then brushed his teeth and, shutting off the bathroom light, returned to room, there to prepare for sleep.

He sat on the edge of the bed to take off his shoes, which is when he noticed there was a note card and a small, foil wrapped chocolate on his pillow. The note was from the management, welcoming him to the hotel and reinforcing the same message he’d received from Dave upon checking in that the staff was ready, willing and able to make his stay a pleasant one. Mr. Barbicane put the note and the chocolate on the night table next to the clock radio then he untied his shoelaces.

The young woman who sat next to Mr. Barbicane between Burbank and Dallas-Ft. Worth found an analogous note on her pillow when she reached her bedroom in her mother’s house in Farmers Branch, north of Dallas on Route 354. She had called her mother on her cell phone from the restaurant where she and Rory were having a painfully quiet late supper and told her not to wait up, that she would let herself in and they’d catch up over breakfast. Her mother said fine, she’d leave the kitchen light on.

She put the phone back in her purse and the meal resumed. There’d been no actual discussion of her going to her mother’s or staying with Rory, but based on the chill he continued to get from her on the drive to the restaurant he decided against bringing up the idea. He realized the possibility of sex, which had kept him going during her absence, was nil. The best thing to do was to try to ride out the storm with as little argument as possible, but really, you reach a point where you have to ask yourself is it worth the effort?

Rory drove her home. She kissed him briefly on the lips, grabbed her bag and went around to the rear of her mother’s house without looking back. Rory slammed the car in gear and made as much noise as possible pulling away from the house; it was the only gesture available to him under the circumstances.

The young woman who had dreamt of her boyfriend and father making love as she slept next to Mr. Barbicane opened the screen door, crossed the back porch and used her key to unlock the kitchen door. She went through the kitchen, switched off the light, and went through to the front of the house where she turned and went up the stairs to the second floor and the hallway that lead past her mother’s bedroom and to the open door of the room she called home from the age of eleven till the day she left for college. It was in this room, with its front facing double dormer windows, that she found her mother’s note on the pillow.

“Vickie. Welcome Home. See You In The Morning. Love. Mom.”

Neatly printed. The first letter of each word capitalized. The way all her mother’s notes looked.

She dropped her bag at the foot of the bed, slipped down the hall to the bathroom where she quietly brushed her teeth then returned to her room and undressed. She put on the big, green “Wallace and Ladmo” t-shirt she got when Rory took her to Phoenix, pulled back the quilt, crawled into bed and turned off the night table lamp.

Light from the street lamps came through the dormer windows and silhouetted the pattern of the lace curtains on the ceiling and far wall. Vickie stretched out under the covers and looked up at the plaster.

There was a stutter of lightning, like a fluorescent lamp with a shot ballast, and eventual thunder rolling somewhere out over the Blackland Prairies to the northeast.

Vickie put her hands on her thighs and tried to remember the feeling she had in her dream, the sensation of suddenly having a penis. More than remembering it, she was curious to feel it again. But she couldn’t get the feeling back. She could remember the sensation, but she couldn’t reproduce it. She couldn’t summon the warm and solid reality of the dream. That was gone. And this made her suddenly sad. What had frightened her had been removed and now she was afraid she’d acted too quickly, woke up too soon. She should have enjoyed the experience more. It was only a dream. If you can’t explore in a dream, what’s the point of sleeping?

The sense of loss was amplified by the fact that she knew she could never tell anyone about the dream. There was no one in her life who would understand, not that she understood herself. She couldn’t tell anyone about seeing Rory and her father kissing and she couldn’t tell anyone about what happened to her body. It would be a secret forever. Something she kept to herself until it started to fade and eventually she wouldn’t even be sure if it had happened. But it didn’t happen. She just dreamed that it happened. But it felt so real, the dream.

It wasn’t fair that a dream could do this to her, put her in this position of having to keep this secret inside forever, to tell no one. She didn’t ask for it, but now she was stuck with it. She’d probably have to break-up with Rory over this and then have to come up with an explanation, something she could say to her mother and other people. Something credible that sounded like the truth, but wasn’t really the truth. All she’d get from telling the truth would be funny looks and people laughing at her and her mother crying over the part about dad never mind the part about growing a penis.

It started to rain again, softer this time. A shower. Just something moving through and blowing the trees so the leaves make that shimmering sound they can make during a light rain.

Had the thing that happened to her in the dream happened because she was watching Rory and her dad? She tried the thought out and dismissed it. She didn’t want it to have happened because of something. She wanted it to be something that was completely her own, authored only by her.

She ran her right hand along the inside of her thigh then lifted her hand and moved it back and forth just above her thigh, ghosting the shape of something she had touched in her dream.

Vickie giggled and was surprised by the sound of her own voice. She whispered to the rain:

“I am the son of Aphrodite and Hermes, raised by naiads in long lost Phrygia. And this is what you get for skinny dipping with Salmacis.”

She pulled a pillow from behind her head and, turning on her side, crushed it between her legs and held it tight.

The secret cause shall here be shown;
The cause is secret, but the effect is known.
Vickie suddenly trembled with the memory.
Grow nearer still, and nearer to her breast.

A dreamy, hot May afternoon toward the end of the semester, incredibly old poetry to fill a lit requirement. All the classes she wanted were filled. Cicadas shrieking somewhere outside the open classroom windows. Bored out of her mind.

Till, piercing each the other’s flesh, they run
Together, and incorporate in one:
Last in one face are both their faces joined,
As when the stock and grafter twig combined
Shoot up the same, and wear a common mind.

Hot and bored and sticking to her clothes and thinking about the weekend, half asleep.

Both bodies in a single body mix,
A single body with a double sex.

Ovid, she cursed. It was all the fault of Ovid!

Ultimately, as is so often the case, blame could be attached to a poem.

Zeus responded to Vickie’s curse with additional lightning and the promise of thunder to follow.

Chapter Nineteen

Looking up, Mr. Barbicane could see himself suspended upside down from the floor of the elevator in the mirrored ceiling of the car. He was alone in the elevator as it carried him to the eighth floor, his one bag beside him.

Check-in had gone well. His reservation was still in place in spite of the delay; the hotel’s computer was in constant and friendly communication with the airline’s computer and was aware of the delay. Mr. Barbicane put the room on a credit card for which he would be credited with frequent flyer miles for later use, and was given a similar, although flimsier piece of plastic with a magnetic strip on one side and the Hyatt logo on the other which would serve as his room key. He signed a document indicating his understanding of the covenant between the Hyatt Corporation and himself, thanked Dave after telling him he required no assistance reaching his room, and went to the elevators at the back of the lobby.

When the elevator doors opened on the eighth floor Mr. Barbicane saw himself again in a large mirror bolted to the opposite wall above a narrow table crowded with flowers. He stepped out of the elevator and started pulling his bag along the corridor after first referring to the informative sign that indicated what rooms were in which direction.

The wheels of his bag whispered on the hallway carpeting as he moved along the comfortingly familiar space, more of the protective tube of travel, this section done in warm browns and deep reds with light coming from amber sconces every fifteen feet, staggered between the walls to create even illumination. No noise but the hush of the closed air circulation system and that sense of life beyond the walls. No, not beyond the walls, not the life of the people in the rooms, but in the wall. The mantra of the wires and conduits and telephone lines that stitched the building into a whole.

Mr. Barbicane reached his room, which was room 814. He slid the plastic key card into the door lock and was greeted with a pin-prick of green light. He opened the door and stepped into the room beyond.

The light by the bed had been turned on so Mr. Barbicane did not have to enter a dark room. It was as he knew it would be: the bed sharply made with a crisply ironed bedspread echoing the color scheme of the room which was a continuation of the color scheme of the hallway, a chair near the head of the bed, another chair at the desk space growing out from the combination armoire and dresser, all a dark mahogany color, the chairs upholstered with the same fabric he’d seen on the chairs in the lobby. Mr. Barbicane’s heart filled with aesthetic coordination as he moved into the room and placed his bag on the foot of the bed.

He went to the window and opened the decorative curtains and the black-out drapes behind them to look out at the short term parking lot where he saw row after row of glowing circles of soft orange luminosity around the bases of the metal stalks supporting the security lights. He saw few cars and no people. The loop roadway beyond the parking lot was empty as well. Pittsburgh, or at least those parts he could see from his hotel room, was asleep.

Mr. Barbicane opened the armoire, found the plastic ice bucket on its courtesy tray along with two squat glasses and, checking to make sure he had his key, left the room and padded down the hushed corridor to the door concealing that floor’s ice machine. He found the ice machine in a boxy little room, more closet than room really, filled with fluorescent light and also containing a vending machine offering cans of soda. He filled his ice bucket and purchased a can of Diet Coke and a can of Diet Nestea Ice Tea. Crunching the two cans into the ice cubes he returned to his room.

Back in the room he would use for the next few hours, Mr. Barbicane opened the mini bar and put the two cans he’d acquired from the vending machine into the small refrigerator already containing smaller , but vastly more expensive cans of the same beverages. On the door of the mini bar were several small packages of candy and salted snacks, each going for approximately two dollars a piece. Above these was a regiment of small bottles of various liquors including some of the same vodka consumed by Diana during final approach.

That brand was not Diana’s brand of choice, it was the airline’s. Diana preferred Stolichnaya, which was what she purchased at the twenty-four hour convenience store and gas station at the edge of the airport before starting the drive home after leaving the aircraft that had brought Mr. Barbicane to Pittsburgh. She bought a 1.75 liter bottle of classic, unflavored Stoli along with a bag of Pepperidge Farm Double Chocolate Milano Cookies, a quart of milk and a lotto ticket. Returning to her sweet little VW beetle (one of the new ones that look more like toys than the old ones ever did), which she had parked beyond the gas pumps, she took the bottle of Stoli out of the bag, cracked the tax label and opened it. She put the bottle to her lips and tipped it back, filling her mouth with the approximate equivalent of a double shooter. Diana then brought her head down, removed the bottle from her lips and swallowed.

The vodka burned more than it would have if it had been chilled, or better yet, come from the freezer. But the convenience store did not keep a supply of chilled vodka and Diana did the best she could with what was available to her. So the liquor took a more ragged path into her than it would have had it been chilled or, better, from the freezer, where the alcohol never freezes but becomes colder than something that has frozen. The molecules slow and the liquid takes on a perceptible thickness, an increased viscosity as you pour it into your mouth and take it into you. The cold fire slides into you with the promise of comfort and warmth and distance to quiet the troubled soul.

There was vodka in the back of Diana’s freezer and she thought of it now as she took one more swallow of the Stoli then capped the bottle, put it back in the plastic bag with the milk and the cookies and the lotto ticket, and started the car. She drove through the pumps and the pumps made no noise. Once there were rubber tubes stretched out between the pumps of gas stations. A car would drive over them and inside the gas station a loud bell would sound, alerting the staff that there was a customer, someone who needed them outside. The tubes and the bells and the people who help are all gone now. Gone so long it seems they might never have been there at all.

The airport access road was empty and there were only a handful of cars on the expressway as Diana headed home. She felt the vodka arrive at her fingertips and smiled. This was a good life. Self-sufficient. A job she actually liked. An apartment she could afford. Feeling had started to return to her nipples following the breast augmentation surgery and the implants themselves had settled nicely. She was happy with her decision to go from a “B” to a “D” because what’s the point of doing something like this if you don’t really do it? Much of her wardrobe had to be replaced, including all her uniforms, but there was no way around that. She liked her larger breasts. She felt they helped her achieve a level of self-confidence and positive body image previously lacking in her personality. She was never not attractive, but now she was simply better. All was good in her life. She was firing on all cylinders now. And there was vodka at the back of her freezer and she would be home in half an hour.

Chapter Eighteen

The eighty some odd passengers who walked through the jet way with Mr. Barbicane when their flight arrived at Pittsburgh International Airport arrived at an empty terminal. For a moment some of them had disturbing thoughts similar to Mr. Barbicane’s when he thought he was alone of the airplane. At this time of night the terminal was quite and unpeopled, as if something had happened to the Earth’s population while the MD-87 was in the air. But with these thoughts came the mechanical complaint of a small industrial floor cleaning machine which could be seen in the distance, ridden by a coveralled worker, polishing the concourse floor. The world had not disappeared.

Mr. Barbicane put his bag on the floor, extended the convenient handle and moved with his fellow travelers toward the internal light rail system that connected the arrival and departure gates of the airport to its central terminal. Having completed his flight, Mr. Barbicane was still a passenger, still someone being efficiently moved from point to point. He was someone for whom plans had been made and contingencies considered.

They moved together, loosely but of one mind, from the departure area into a dead-end space with black glass doors to either side. There they waited, watching the red readout numbers of the digital display set up over the obsidian doors, counting down the seconds to the arrival of the next shuttle train.

As the numbers dropped below ten there was a billowing roar from the other side of the doors that began to tremble at the fluctuations in air pressure contained in the tunnel beyond. A moment later a substantial bulk snaked its way into the station and filled the space behind the doors. The doors of the station and the doors of the subway car beyond opened simultaneously and Mr. Barbicane and the others stepped into a car that was cleaner than any subway car he’d ever seen before. Polished and shinning, it was clean the way transportation systems are clean only if they’re never asked to serve the general public, but instead make two mile runs at airports to demonstrate the practicality and dependability of modern light rail…as long as you don’t ask too much of it.

Once all the passengers from the flight were on the car there was a “bing-bong” sound and the doors slid closed. A moment and the car was jerked back into the tunnel. Mr. Barbicane, who was standing, took hold of a gleaming metal pole in which he would see is distended reflection.

During the walk from the plane through the terminal to the shuttle stop and now on board the shuttle, no one spoke. Mr. Barbicane had heard no voice since the “bye-bye” of the cabin attendant with the plum colored lip-stick as he stepped off the plane and onto the jet way. They had come so far together and yet had nothing to say to each other. Mr. Barbicane smiled at his reflection in the pole. How pleasant it was to travel with people who minded their own business and asked nothing of you.

If Mr. Barbicane had a dream it was to one day cross the United States of America by commercial transportation, changing planes three, perhaps even four times, and speak to no one, expect in an official capacity. To only talk to uniformed people, from sea to shining sea.

The ride through the dark tunnel of what was officially known as the airport’s “People Mover” took less than two minutes then the doors of the car, and corresponding black glass doors of the terminal station opened and the group silently, politely moved into a larger, emptier space. This was the central ticketing and check in area of the Pittsburgh International Airport. It was built on two levels, the lower with access to curbside check in, parking and rental car offices and containing the baggage carrousels, the upper level with various food and other services, all closed at this time of the morning, security and ticket counters and, ahead of them, beyond the core cut in the floor for the metal loops of the escalators, three sets of wide glass doors leading to the feature of this airport Mr. Barbicane was most anxious to experience.

The people who had been on the plane with him started to peel off for the rental car desks and baggage claim, out to the curb to meet their ride or find a cab or climb onto another shuttle to the long term parking. But Mr. Barbicane pressed on, stepping around the escalators and approaching the glass doors which sensed his approach and opened ahead of him.

Beyond the open doors he saw it: The moving walkway.

Is there anything more futuristic than a moving walkway? Futuristic in the sense of not actually relating to the future, just as being moderne has nothing to do with being modern.

Stretching out from the doors to the terminal was a completely functioning moving walkway that “whisks” people along to the short term parking and the Hyatt Regency Hotel. How many forms of transportation can honestly claim to “whisk” people?

Mr. Barbicane crossed the carpeted space leading to the entrance of the walkway and paused before stepping from the metal plate leading to the rubber conveyer belt endlessly unrolling toward the horizon. He took a step and planted one foot on the rubber belt and committed to taking the next step. While his other foot was in the air the belt started pulling Mr. Barbicane and his rolling suitcase forward. He put his feet together and walked no further. He was motionless, yet in motion. Remarkable.

In this fashion Mr. Barbicane was carried along at a speed of approximately 4.8 miles per hour over the inner roadway in front of the central passenger terminal, through the short term parking lot and over a second roadway, traveling perhaps three-quarters of a mile before he saw signage ahead for the Hyatt, like a freeway exit.

Mr. Barbicane took hold of the handrail and found that it was moving at a slightly faster rate than that of the walkway. Looking at his hand he saw that it was advancing ahead of him, stretching out, as if of its own volition. He found this mildly disturbing and took his hand from the rail just as he reached the end of that portion of the walkway and stepped off, coming to a stop directly in front of the entrance to the hotel.

He had arrived at his hotel at the end of a continuous construct of artificial environments. Mr. Barbicane had not been exposed to the air or the sky since he climbed onboard the first plane so many hours ago in Burbank. Since then he had been in what was essentially a sealed tube of transportation that had delivered him to the automatic doors of the hotel which opened to welcome him, ready to keep him safe from the world a little while longer.

The transition from moving walkway to hotel lobby was seamless. This was a hotel for travelers, not tourists. From the outside it was brown stone with one sign above the top floor identifying its purpose and identity. There was no grand marquee, no door man, no sweeping foyer. Only the simple, slightly downward slopping ramp between potted plants leading to the cheerful lobby that looked like a thousand other lobbies; warm wood, comfortable chairs, a wall given over to a flat metal sculpture shimmering with falling water, and a reception desk behind which stood an amazingly young man with straw colored hair and a blazer with the Hyatt logo over his heart and a name tag identifying him as Dave.

Dave smiled at Mr. Barbicane and welcomed him to the Hyatt Regency Pittsburgh.

Chapter Seventeen

Mr. Barbicane closed his eyes after eating, but he did not sleep. At least he didn’t think he slept. The cabin attendant with the plum colored lipstick served him his filet mignon and scalloped potatoes and when she offered Mr. Barbicane indulged himself in a glass of wine, a modest but pleasant Cabernet Sauvignon which was the same variety of wine Vivian Teller’s aggrieved lover threw in her face more than twenty years ago, but not the same quality. He had a second glass and when the cabin attendant took away his tray he folded his table into the seat back in front of him, turned off his reading light, wedged a pillow against the plastic inner shell of the fuselage near the darkened window and closed his eyes.

He listened to the sounds of the cabin, which felt different at night although there was no reason for this. Perhaps you simply hear things differently after a certain hour, when the day has started to catch up with you. He could hear his own breathing now, slowing. The wine relaxed him, brought the pleased grin to his lips the first drink always brought him. Mr. Barbicane drank little, but he always enjoyed what he drank. He savored the feel of something warm moving within him. It permitted him moments of uncensored satisfaction with his life. He hadn’t done so badly, all things considered.

Then he heard a woman’s voice. Not close, but very clear, saying one word: “Later.”

Mr. Barbicane opened his eyes and turned to the voice, but saw nothing. He thought he was awake, but perhaps he’d drifted off. There was no one in the seat next to him and looking across the aisle he realized those two seats were empty as well. He couldn’t remember seeing anyone in them before take-off, but he couldn’t swear they’d been empty.

He had dreamed someone said “Later” to him. A woman.

Mr. Barbicane was trying to remember the voice, trying to identify the speaker based on the one word when he noticed he couldn’t see anyone else on the airplane. The seats he could see clearly were all empty, and he was in the last row of the first class cabin so a curtain obscured the coach seating. The larger seats in first and his being against the window made it impossible for him to see if there was anyone in the seats in front of him. It was late, the cabin services were finished and everyone was asleep. That was clearly the case. But he wished he could see someone else. A wedge of shoulder between the seats in front of him, or one of the cabin attendants moving up the aisle on some errand. But there was no one.

And the longer he considered this the more some part of his brain started to whisper to him that there was no one to see because there was no one else on the airplane. That, in fact, Mr. Barbicane was alone.

This was, of course, absurd. Mr. Barbicane knew this and yet he was suddenly unable to take the very simple step of leaning across the open seat next to him and looking down the aisle to the front of the cabin where he was certain he would see one of the cabin attendants either standing in the galley or resting in one of the jump seats. Even if he did lean across the seat and look and even if he didn’t see a cabin attendant, that didn’t mean he was alone on the plane. It simply meant that coincidence had conspired against his seeing anyone at that particular moment. He knew this, but he still didn’t move.

And then he started to wonder if the plane was actually moving. He could feel the vibration of the engines, but he had no sense of motion. This is not unusual with clear weather and a moonless night, it was a trick of the darkness. But in that moment it only served to add to Mr. Barbicane’s sudden sense of unreality; that he was sitting on an empty plane that was not in flight, that might be on the ground or suspended in someway.

This was an example of how Mr. Barbicane’s imagination was often at odds with his best interests. Throughout his childhood and even later he was able to undermine his own well-being by thoughts that really couldn’t stand up to the test of logic but still had the power to rob him of sleep. There was, of course, the ability to find suspicious shapes in a darkened bedroom, and there were the dreamt encounters with a mischievous, cone shaped troll named the “Crumb-bum” who lived under the kitchen sink. There were also the poisonous and ambulatory Triffids who stalked outside his bedroom window after he saw the science fiction movie in which the sinister trees played a titular role. Then there were the small gray aliens who existed at the extreme edge of your vision, diminutive and implacable. These were particularly frightening because you knew they were there and were afraid to turn and see them, as if they wanted only to watch and would be provoked to attack if caught in their spying.

He was thinking of aliens and Triffids and the Crumb-bum from his childhood when the curtain from coach split and a cabin attendant made her way forward to the galley and the reasonable world snapped back in place around Mr. Barbicane. A moment later his friend with the plum colored lipstick came by to tell him they were just short of making their initial approach to Pittsburgh and did he want any more wine before they buttoned up the galley. Mr. Barbicane declined.

When the cabin attendant straightened from her lean in to talk to Mr. Barbicane, he looked out the window again and below could see a grid of suburban lights crawling beneath the plane. There were people on board and he was in motion. Good.

The pilot came on the public address system and formally announced their approach to Pittsburgh and apologized again for the delay as he announced the local time to be one a.m. He requested that the cabin attendants prepare the cabin for arrival.

Mr. Barbicane’s friend with the plum colored lipstick and curly air set about her duties of securing the galley. She took the opportunity to remove a small plastic bottle of vodka from the drink cart, crack the seal and, her back to the cabin, poured the contents into her mouth. She swallowed, put the empty bottle in her apron pocket, pushed the drink cart into its storage location and locked it in place. The vodka glowed within her as she touched the corner of her mouth and checked her lipstick in the small mirror attached at eye-level to the upper bulkhead cabinets.

Later inventory of the liquor would be taken by a service representative for the airline and the vodka count would come up two short. If someone were to compare these records with flight crew lists they would find a corollary between unaccounted for bottles of vodka and late night flights on which Mr. Barbicane’ friend with the plum colored lipstick served. However, this particular airline did not correlate those two pieces of information and remained unaware of this particular cabin attendant’s sense of entitlement toward drinking at the end of a flight on those nights when delays kept her working beyond what would have normally been the end of her shift.

She reapplied her lipstick looking in the mirror and feeling the vodka move through her far more rapidly and to greater calming effect than Mr. Barbicane’s Cabernet Sauvignon.

The Cabernet Sauvignon that was thrown in Vivian Teller’s face by her dancer/lover in an apartment in New York more than twenty years earlier had been brought to the party by a young man named Dexter who was in the process of failing as a playwright and would soon leave Manhattan, return to his hometown in the Florida panhandle and take over his father’s Toyota dealership. Every day he would put on a suit and go to the dealership and extol the virtues of the small, economical cars. Between sales and attempted sales he sat at his desk in a cubicle of the showroom and wrote plays which he showed no one.

One day, Dexter stepped out onto the lot and approached a young woman in stretch pants and a DisneyWorld baby-doll t-shirt, and wearing a pair of oversized sunglasses which concealed a black eye. Dexter told her about the finer points of the new Tercel. He got the sense that the woman was either flirting with him or was possibly a little drunk. It was eleven o’clock in the morning and he hoped she was being flirtatious. He was fascinated by her, by her long, straight blonde hair and the way she kept worrying the simulated leather strap of her shoulder bag. He promised he would remember these details and write them down in his notebook when he got back into the show room with the thought of using them in a play some day. After ten minutes, the blonde woman thanked Dexter and said she’d think about it. He returned to the showroom where he was distracted by some botched paperwork executed by the agency bookkeeper who was also his father’s mistress and never got around to writing down the details of his encounter with the young woman who, upon leaving the Toyota dealership, went to an appointment with her doctor at which she would learn that she was pregnant with the baby who would grow up to sneak vodka on airplanes when no one was looking. She would name the baby Diana.

The world around Mr. Barbicane was spun with similar webs of connection, but he was as unaware of them as the rest of us are.

Chapter Sixteen

When Mr. Barbicane’s plane left the gate all that remained of Vivian Teller’s storm extended shift was to complete the paperwork on the departed flight. This she did and said goodnight to her fellow counter agents and left the departure area. She used her security key to unlock an anonymous door leading to an employee lounge and locker room where she claimed her coat and comfortable shoes then headed out of the lounge and out of the terminal to wait for the bus that would take her to the employee parking lot located out beyond the hangers used by the carriers of freight.

It was not raining when she reached the shuttle stop, but there was rain in the air. There was also a mist of sorts, water picked up by the tires of all the cars orbiting the terminals and kicked up into the air while all the time making that sound somewhere between a “shush” and the tearing of an endless piece of paper unique to cars in the rain.

Mr. Barbicane’s plane was next in line for take-off when the shuttle arrived and Vivian climbed on board for the ride to the parking lot. The MD-87 waited patiently, if such a large machine can be said to wait, then turned into position and was lined up with the runway markers. Clearance was given, throttles applied and Mr. Barbicane once again felt the thrilling inertial hand pushing him back in his seat, as if gravity and the Earth were reluctant to let him go. He smiled at this contest of such great forces concerned with someone as relatively unimportant at himself.

Mr. Barbicane could see the lights of the terminal in the distance and watched as the building and the ground it was on tilted then dropped away as the plane left the ground and climbed. Below him he saw a curious thing. He thought, for a moment, he saw a lake. A square lake just past the edge of the airport. A square lake filled with small boats all docked very closely together. There seemed to him no room on the lake for these boats to go if they ever left their moorings.

Mr. Barbicane had no way of knowing that what he was looking at was the employee parking lot. The drainage system for the parking lot had been overwhelmed by the storm just as the one at the airport proper. But here debris continued to block the grates leaving the parking lot with about four inches of standing water, which accounted for the impression of a lake Mr. Barbicane received when he flew over it. The tightly packed boats were, of course, parked cars.

Vivian Teller had to make her way through the trapped water in order to reach her car after getting off the shuttle bus. She stepped as lightly as she could, keeping her arms slightly out from her body for balance. She was not wearing boots, they were back in her apartment, but a pair of running shoes which she feared would be no good to anyone once they were finished with this walk.

Looking along row G-7 she saw her blue Honda Civic and used the tiny transmitter in her key chain to turn off the alarm and unlock the doors. As she got in the car another storm moved over the airport and it began to rain, not as heavily as before, but with sufficient intensity to suggest this was more than a shower and would be with her all the way home.

She shrugged out of her coat, put on her seat belt, put the key in the ignition and was relieved that the car started without complaint after the storm. Vivian put the car in reverse, backed out of the space, then shifted and headed along the row of cars, leaving behind a wake consisting of competing and overlapping “V” patterns in the water which rippled out to hit the tires of the parked cars and bounce back until the space between the rows very much resembled the surface of a choppy lake like the one Mr. Barbicane thought he saw as his plane took off.

Beyond the parking lot was an access road leading to the expressway that would take Vivian home. She’d turned on her lights when she started the car and now turned on the windshield wipers. There were a few cars on the access road, more as she approached the expressway. She merged onto the four lane roadway and accelerated. But up ahead there was some sort of problem. She could see the brake lights of cars a half mile ahead of her flashing on, then off, then on again as if to avoid a collision, then moving forward.

She strained to see what was going on ahead, if there’d been an accident of some sort, and finally saw what was causing the trouble. At first she thought it was a plastic bag or something like that blowing across the roadway. Then she realized it was a medium sized white dog of indeterminate breed running on the expressway, darting between the cars. Vivian was past the dog before she fully realized what was happening, and without thought she eased her car onto the muddy shoulder of the expressway.

She checked her mirror then opened the driver’s door, got out of the car and started back along the shoulder, looking ahead to where the frightened dog was jogging and charging through the confusion of rain and headlights. The odds that this was going to end happily, she realized, were remote. By stopping and getting out of her car she probably had guaranteed nothing aside from actually seeing the poor animal get killed.

The dog was white, perhaps fifteen inches at the shoulder, with a nice lupine snout. Drenched as it was it was unrecognizable to Vivian Teller as a Standard Poodle, a breed she had only seen humiliatingly groomed in television coverage of dog shows. She was unaware that if you simply maintained their coats at an even level, they looked like dogs instead of stuffed toys.

The dog was terrified, darting back and forth, freezing in the headlights, reacting to multiple horns, never more than a few seconds and a few feet from being sent pin-wheeling into the air. Vivian had no idea what to do. She was about to call to the dog, although she didn’t know what to call, then she stopped, afraid that the dog would respond and either turn to her at the worst possible moment and get hit, or possibly start running toward her and get killed in the process. She had to do something. She couldn’t just go back to her car now.

Then there was a sudden and starling gap in the traffic. The sounds of the cars fell away for a moment and suddenly the stretch of roadway between Vivian and the dog was clear. She looked up the road and saw the headlights of the next wave, barreling down on her.

Vivian Teller looked at the dog. Then she ran toward him, out into the middle of the rainy expressway, all the time holding out her right hand and saying, “Here, buddy. Okay, buddy. Good dog.”

The dog stood transfixed at the sight of this strange, rain soaked woman coming toward him (it was a male), starkly and increasingly illuminated on one side by the approaching headlights. He shrank back a few feet then thought better of it.

Vivian reached the poodle and scooped him up into her arms, surprised to find he weighed easily forty pounds. She turned toward the headlights then lost her footing on the road surface slick from the combination of rain water and the rubber worn from countless tires. Vivian started to fall, still holding the wet dog to her chest. Someone in an oncoming car thought the wisest thing to do under the circumstances was to lean on his horn. The sound cut through Vivian as she stumbled, trying to at least fall in the direction of the shoulder.

Certainly what Vivian Teller decided to do was both foolish and dangerous. Her death and the death of the dog would have been a very reasonable and realistic outcome. She had made a terrible mistake, perhaps thinking the selflessness of her actions would protect her from harm. Actually, there was very little conscious thought in her actions. One minute she was looking at the dog, the next minute she was holding the dog and that was really all there was to it. She couldn’t make a sound argument for the action if anyone had asked her. And now she was falling. She would fall and before she could get up she would be run over, probably more than once, and that would be that. It was clear to her in that moment what would happen, and what she chose to do, itself a useless act, was to try to twist her body in order to protect the dog from the first impact of the first car.

Falling and dying and, in death, tying up traffic. All in all a stupid way to go; the sort of meaningless leave taking that happens a thousand times every day.

But it was decided that there had been a sufficient number of deaths that particular day so Vivian was permitted to stumbled on, dancing across the expressway, tripping over the edge of the pavement and landing, still holding the dog, on the rain soaked shoulder as the next wave of cars and trucks stampeded by, horns blasting.

She sat up, clutching the dog trembling in her arms. Then she realized it wasn’t the dog that was shaking, it was her. She looked at the dog who looked right back at her. He had a collar, but no tags and Vivian thought he must have escaped from a travel case back and the airport. Someone would be looking for him.

Vivian got to her feet, kept one hand looped around the dog’s collar and trotted him back to her idling car. She put him in the back seat where he immediately shook off several pints of rain water.

Being very careful, Vivian went around to the driver’s side of the car and got back behind the wheel. She would take the dog home with her, keep him for the night and dry him off and call the airport in the morning and talk to the people in baggage to see if they’d lost a white dog.

She eased the car back into traffic and started to drive home again. She could see the still very wet dog in her rear view mirror, sitting up on the back seat and looking toward her. He seemed to accept the entire situation without question.

“I was in a box, then I was running, then there was a lot of noise, and this woman showed up and now I’m in this car. I guess something else will happen now. I wonder what it will be.”

Chapter Fifteen

It was after seven in the evening when Mr. Barbicane finished his free food and looked up to see that the storm had abated. He was informed by a ticket agent using the public address system that the weather was indeed clearing to the east and that Mr. Barbicane’s flight to Pittsburgh International Airport would be departing within the hour. The airline was sorry for the delay, even though it was caused by circumstances completely beyond its control.

Mr. Barbicane collected the debris left by his snack and tossed the bag and empty soda bottle into an appropriate receptacle as he moved away from the departure area and crossed the polished concourse floor to visit the men’s room once more before boarding.

At eight fifteen, Mr. Barbicane handed his boarding pass to Vivian Teller who inspected it, found it in order and handed it back to him, wishing him a pleasant flight. It would be narratively satisfying to note that in that transaction their fingers touched for a moment and both sensed a strange, indefinable connection, something that would haunt them for the rest of their lives, but their fingers did not touch and no such connection was forged.

For the second time that day, Mr. Barbicane settled into a first class window seat onboard a Boeing MD-87. He couldn’t have been happier, fully expecting this second departure to be more relaxing, more satisfying than the first. Gone was all the anxiety about possibly being foiled in his departure, of being prevented from becoming a passenger. He already was a passenger and was continuing his journey without ever having to unpack or do business or leave the security and warm anonymity of Airportia. He had traveled from airplane to airplane with calm efficiency and was feeling exceptionally proud of himself as he buckled his seatbelt and looked out the rain splattered window at the ground crew in their yellow slickers.

He felt the energy of this flight would be different from the first leg of his trip. For one thing it was night, almost nine local time and they would not arrive in Pittsburgh until well after one a.m. No one would be charging the cabin doors when they arrived to rush to a meeting or make a connection. Whatever was going to happen to them in Pittsburgh would not happen for several hours. There were fewer passengers on this flight. The seat next to Mr. Barbicane was empty and he wondered if it would remain so until take-off. There is less fussing by the cabin crew during a night flight, the rhythm is that of discretion. Cabin lights would be lowered and services would be offered but not insisted upon. If a passenger wished to sleep undisturbed, all they needed to do was make sure their seatbelt was buckled outside the thin blanket provided by the airline so the cabin attendants would not be obliged to wake them to check.

A cabin attendant with short cropped, intensely curly hair and lipstick the color of crushed plums offered him an extra pillow and asked him if he thought he would be using the meal service; normally at this time of night only a “late snack” would be offered, but since the flight was originally intended to depart in the early evening it was supplied with dinner entrées. Mr. Barbicane took the pillow and said he would very much like dinner. He selected the filet mignon with scalloped potatoes.

Mr. Barbicane turned to the window again and looked out at the jet way between the terminals. Water still rushed in ragged streams, converging on the drainage grates set in the concrete. He looked up and saw the bottom of the clouds painted a bluish white by the lights of the airport. Soon he would see stars, but first he had to leave the surface of the planet again, taking off in the dark, which was a very different experience from taking off during the day.

Take off during the day and your eye is crowded with detail; cars, roads, buildings, rarely people for some reason, then the grid of streets, then the sense of geography. But when you take off at night you don’t see those things. Rather you see their ghostly indicators. You see the headlights of cars and not the cars themselves, the bright windows of buildings and not the outlines of individual structures. There’s a grid, but it’s a grid of tiny chips of mirrored glass organized on a black surface. Not black velvet, that metaphor is reserved for the sky. The earth is something else. A beach at night. No color, just the sense of something flat and far reaching in front of you.

The forward cabin door was closed and dogged and Mr. Barbicane turned to see that the seat next to him was still empty. He would travel the rest of the way to Pittsburgh in near solitude. The success in leaving Burbank, the delay in Texas and now this, still with the promise of another airport and a hotel room at the end of the day. Mr. Barbicane was very pleased with how things were going.

While the senior cabin attendant gave the pre-departure safety announcement, Mr. Barbicane gave his attention to the woman with the plum colored lips who stood at the front of the cabin and mimed the instructions. Often the cabin attendants give the charge of acting out these instructions, demonstrating with a belt that secures nothing and an unconnected oxygen mask, betray a certain ennui about the task. They do it by rote with no eye contact. Perhaps the bland expressions is meant to communicate the seriousness of the instructions being issued, but more often it came across, at least to Mr. Barbicane, as indifference.

That was not the case with the curly haired woman he watched that night. Her eyes were bright and she smiled as she demonstrated the safety equipment, opened and closed the safety card, a duplicate of the one he could find in the pouch built into the back of the seat in front of him. There was an unmistakable flair as she indicated the locations of the various exits, the forward cabin doors and the over wing exits. Her hands seemed to be moving to some unheard music. Her arms were loose, her hands softly turned into the index and middle finger pointing gesture with the slightest hint of a bounce at the top of their arc. Delightful.

The MD-87 was pushed back from the gate by a tractor. Again the sound of the hitch being detached and the sound of the pilot increasing his touch on the throttle to move the bulk of the airplane out of the alley and toward the taxi way. The aircraft cleared the terminal and started its long roll out into the darkness of the active runways, rolling away from the glare of the terminal lights. Ahead he could make out the running lights of the other aircraft waiting in line for clearance to begin or continue their delayed journey.

Certainly there were people on those other plans feeling frustration over the storm’s interruption. There were, in all likelihood, people on the plane with Mr. Barbicane who felt thwarted and aggrieved by the delay and their unavoidable lateness. But Mr. Barbicane could share none of their sourness. He had been given without wishing the gift of additional passangerhood, more time in which the system gently moved him from place to place and he enjoyed the feel of the current. His MD-87 took its place in the line of aircraft. Mr. Barbicane was looking forward to his filet mignon.

Chapter Fourteen

Had Mr. Barbicane decided not to eat at that point, if he had decided instead to put down the bag of food and the bottle of Diet Coke and cross the short distance between his seat and the ticket counter for his gate and engaged the woman who had been touching her heart, perhaps asking her about the gesture, it’s possible, but not very likely, that Mr. Barbicane and the woman would have, in the course of the conversation, discovered that they once had the same employer. That they had, in fact, once been in the same McDonald’s at the same time, but not at the same table.

In March of 1983, both Mr. Barbicane and the woman, whose name was Vivian Teller, worked for Redi-Temp, a temporary employment agency with offices on Madison Avenue between Thirty-eighth and Thirty-ninth Streets in Manhattan. Mr. Brabicane’s unemployment had run out the previous January and, unable to find permanent work, he was compelled to take on temp assignments at various offices throughout the city. Miss Teller was in a similar situation. She had come to New York City in hopes of an acting career. She had been taking drama, singing and acting lessons, going out on auditions and working for little or no pay in various showcase productions in lower Manhattan. She had been doing this for the better part of a year with very little measurable success.

She managed to have two affairs during that period. The first with an actor she met in her first scene study class, a man her own age named Rodney who concentrated less on the craft of acting than on the maintenance of his facial hair. One night at the apartment of people they knew Vivian laughed at the joke of someone who had more talent than Rodney. Rodney then slapped Vivian across the face. The next day Rodney quit the scene study class and left for Minneapolis with two hundred dollars he took from the envelope in which Vivian kept her rent money hidden in a box of Van Camp Fish Sticks in the back of her freezer.

The other affair had been with a dancer who was older and taller than Vivian and also a woman. It was the first such relationship for Vivian, but one in a long line of corrosive affairs for the dancer. It made Vivian feel exotic and wicked and very bohemian. She and the dancer would be openly affectionate with each other in public. They would spend long Sunday mornings in bed with the New York Times, making love until three o’clock in the afternoon when they would finally get dressed, go out, and have breakfast at a place called “Pancakes Make People Happy.” Vivian did not fully identify herself as a lesbian, but coming after Rodney she felt this was a distinct upgrade.

Unfortunately, the dancer applied a time honored and fairly rigid pattern to all her affairs, and she did not alter this often repeated timetable for Vivian. There was an increasing monopolization of Vivian’s time, repeated challenges about people she talked to on the phone, and interrogations about people she worked with in acting classes or at her temp jobs. There were also stepped up demands for sex as proof that Vivian still found the dancer attractive and youthful. Things were further complicated by the dancer’s demands that Vivian come out to her family, less as a political act than as a commitment to her lover. The constant demand that she demonstrate her affection for this truly beautiful woman who had on occasion so powerfully pleasured Vivian that she thought she would never be able to walk normally again depressed her.

It came to a head, as it had with Rodney, at a party. In this case Vivian made the mistake of complimenting her hostess’s attire. The hostess was in the midst of thanking her for the compliment and was about to tell her where she had acquired the particular blouse when Vivian saw her eyes shoot wide, shocked by something happening behind Vivian. Vivian didn’t turn quickly enough to see the dancer actually hurl the contents of her glass at her face, but did she catch sight of a large, dark cloud of inexpensive red wine coming at her and blotting out the room. The dancer threw her glass to the floor, where the thick carpet (also now stained with the wine) prevented her exit from being properly punctuated with breaking glass, then left the apartment.

Vivian stood there with wine on her face, embarrassment and conciliatory cooing all around her, and wondered if this would be the pattern of her relationships for the rest of her life: Passion, then madness, and the whole mess capped off with her at the receiving end of a cheap melodramatic gesture.

On the day Vivian Teller and Mr. Barbicane ended up in the same McDonald’s at the same time, but not at the same table, she was very close to deciding to give up on a career in the theater and seek employment among people of a more even temperament. She was half way through a three week assignment working as a receptionist and back-up typist at a trade organization called The American Plastics Manufacturers Association where she answered phones, took messages and typed reports about trends in the expandable polystyrene bead segment of the industry. It was a place without art or affectation, uncontaminated by creativity or ego. It was bliss as near as Miss Teller could discern. What was stardom compared to contentment?

The office was on Fifty-seventh Street near Seventh Avenue. At lunch she would walk through the big art store on the south side of the street and work her way to one of the nearby fast food restaurants. She was not a connoisseur of fast food. She was eating in these places as a sort of revenge against her departed dancer/lover who was a vegetarian and wanted the world to know about it.

The McDonald’s in which Mr. Barbicane and Miss Teller didn’t meet was around the corner on Eighth Avenue. It had two levels and both Mr. Barbicane and Miss Teller were seated on the second level, both facing the window. One was at a table, the other was at a booth. They were about twenty feet apart, coincidentally the same approximate distance that separated them in the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport more than twenty years later.

Miss Teller arrived at a quarter past one, Mr. Barbicane got there at twelve fifty-eight. They purchased similar but not identical meals. While they both purchased Big Macs, Mr. Barbicane added a large order of fries and Miss Teller an apple pie.

The McDonald’s apple pie does not resemble a pie, but rather looks like a flattened tube of some sort of breading or crust reminiscent of a burrito.

Both Mr. Barbicane and Miss Teller purchased large Diet Cokes. Diet Coke had been introduced a year earlier and was the first new Coca-Cola product to reach consumers since 1886. It rapidly overtook its sister product, Tab, which was sweetened with saccharin. Diet Coke was originally sweetened with saccharin, but the formula was changed and the beverage was sweetened with aspartame by the time Mr. Barbicane and Miss Teller placed their orders.

The Big Mac hamburger sandwiches seen on television and in print advertising look nothing like the woebegone and compressed constructions you get at the outlets themselves. Where the Big Macs in the commercials are always impeccably built, towering and full of apparent goodness, the ones you actually get when you unwrap them from the wax paper and remove the cardboard ring designed to hold the sandwich together as you move it from the counter to your table or your car, looks like a crude parody of the delicious treat depicted in the ads. Looking at a recently unwrapped Big Mac is to experience a great sense of sadness, as if the failure and frustration of the underpaid workers toiling to pile the ingredients into this lopsided tower had been taken up by the food they prepared. To look at a Big Mac cradled in paper on a recently wiped plastic table, often sill redolent of the cleaning chemicals used to disinfect it (the table, not the sandwich) is to experience an entire generation of dead ends all summed up in one edible lump.

Long after she’d eaten her last Big Mac (which was in 1987) Miss Teller would think of the sad sandwiches and think about a play she’d once performed in somewhere in the wilds of Alphabet City. The play was about a sin-eater. A sin-eater was someone in British and Irish culture who, for a price, went to the bedside of a dying person and took on their sins by eating bread ritually placed on the breast of the one who was dying. The play was about a sin-eater named Finn who ran afoul of the priest in his town. Vivian had been surprised to learn that the Catholic Church considered sin eating a cardinal sin punishable by excommunication. The church didn’t want people getting the idea that there was an alternative form of absolution and that sins could be dealt with in any manner other than through confession and contrition.

To Vivian, a Big Mac looked like the perfect vehicle for a lifetime of sin. It looked like something that had been soaking up venal and cardinal infractions for a very long time. And, not surprising to her, it tasted really good. Ugly enough to be a made out of canvas and tempera by Claes Oldenburg, a Big Mac has a sinister, seductive taste calling to us with both the sweetness of the secret sauce and the cutting taste of the over-salted meat patties. A Big Mac gets on your hands and you have to lick the shreds of lettuce and sauce and diced onion and bits of pickles that appear to have been prepared with pinking shears. It was messy and shameful and you knew it as you ate it.

Sin, apparently, tastes very good, elevates your cholesterol level and makes you fat.

Mr. Barbicane, who was that day working in an office that processed complaints filed against a manufacturer of casual wear, did not consider the religious aspects of his Big Mac. For him it was one of several possible meals that could be had for an economical price within walking distance of his assignment.

The two people sat there, sharing the space for approximately forty minutes. Then Mr. Barbican left first and returned to the office early. Vivian lingered, looking out the second floor window at the offices in the building across the street where she saw workers not dissimilar from her in offices not that unlike the one occupied by The American Plastics Manufactures Association. She wondered what she would do next then took another bite of her Big Mac and hoped, somewhere, somehow, her ex-dancer was aware that she was eating meat.

All this might strike the casual observer as a remarkable coincidence; that two people so close to each other in an airport were once in the same room at the same time, but not at the same table in a city more than a thousand miles away, more than twenty-years earlier. And that the two people who were unaware of each other then were essentially just as unaware of each other now, and that they would continue on along the divergent paths of their lives without ever being aware of how those two paths came so close to crossing not once, but twice. That is the impression someone looking at this from the outside might take away. But really, this sort of thing happens all the time. It’s just that nobody knows about it.

Chapter Thirteen

While the young man and woman made their way out of the terminal and into the parking structure, Mr. Barbicane, unaware of the ramifications of the young woman’s dream, the effect it was having on her in so-called waking life, proceeded to the video monitor just inside the door of the departure area and checked his connecting information. He found, much to his satisfaction, that his connecting flight was in a different finger of the terminal and he would have to walk perhaps a quarter mile to reach it.

He set his bag on the floor, opened the outer zipper compartment and placed his auxiliary meal into the pocket. Then he pulled the telescoping handle up and locked it before taking a firm grip on the handle and starting out of the departure area. The wheels of the bag transitioned with a thump from the carpet of the departure area to the polished surface of the terminal promenade.

Local time was just after four, but the approaching storm brought about an accelerated darkness and the walkways and departure gates were already bathed in carefully designed artificial light, more the idea of light than light itself. Mr. Barbicane was pleased to see that his experiment with the young woman on the airplane had been successful and that his fellow travelers were discernable as individuals with faces and proportional limbs. Having satisfied himself that the passengers around him had not changed into a single undulating mass of faces and bags and clothes, he let his awareness of them drop away in order to better enjoy his walk through the terminal.

His plan was to do as he always did in such situations which was to proceed directly to his announced departure gate, and once arriving there and checking in if possible, take care of any pre-boarding business. In this case that would include the purchase of a package of band-aids to protect his cut finger.

With the lightness of heart he always felt when in purposeful motion, Mr. Barbicane continued along the concourse, watching the gate numbers descend as he approached the central hub of the terminal. All around him were arrivals and departures, people in a constant state of flux. Some returning, some leaving, some beginning, some ending, some tired, others filled with excitement. All of this human activity was supervised by the uniformed employees of the various airlines supported by the personnel employed by the airport for the tasks of security and sanitation. And it all seemed so unwaveringly productive to him. All this activity, of which he was a measurable part, filled him with pride.

His happiness was compounded by the knowledge that he didn’t have to leave this building. He could draw on its energy then get on another aircraft and enjoy his second take-off of the day.

Mr. Barbicane reached the base of the terminal finger and turned right. As he walked to the adjacent terminal wing he was able to see the main open space of the terminal with its security and ticket facilities. One of the great endearing things about airports, modern airports, recently built airports, is that they always felt like civic space as it might have been designed by the people who built sinister secret headquarters in vintage James Bond movies. The airports Mr. Barbicane liked best always made him feel like we was walking through the secret volcano launching site in You Only Live Twice. The good airports seemed to be a collection of forced perspectives and gleaming metal imparting a sense of urgent activity simply by being contained in their architectural embrace. Anyone moving through a space such as this must be a person of note, of significance.

Mr. Barbicane felt his posture straighten as he continued along the terminal edge, arrived at the appropriate finger and started along the wide concourse with it ascendingly numbered departure lounges on his right hand and all manner of services and conveniences on his left.

He realized the storm that had pursued him had arrived while he was transversing the terminal and now the floor to ceiling windows on the departure side of the finger were being pelted with intense rain while lightning lanced the sky. The thunder was audible under the sounds of the terminal, but it was muffled and seemed removed from the storm that produced it.

Reaching his designated gate he was not surprised to learn that the airport had temporarily suspended operations because of the storm and therefore his flight to Pittsburgh would be delayed. Others around him bemoaned this interruption in their travel. Mr. Barbicane did not. An additional extension of his passenger status was guaranteed by this delay. Another layer of abstraction had been applied. He was now suspended in the storm that blissfully compounded his powerlessness and made him smile.

As soon as there was an update on the weather it would be posted and an announcement made. While the delay would certainly be an hour and potentially longer, it was suggested passengers remain in the immediate departure lounge area in order to hear any and all updates.

Mr. Barbicane took this opportunity to use the men’s room and visit the newspaper and souvenir shop where he purchased a twenty ounce bottle of Diet Coke and a small package of band-aides paying, as he had anticipated, a price disproportionate to the number of bandages acquired. He then returned to the departure lounge associated with his gate and took a seat at the end of a row of chairs bolted to the floor and facing the expanse of windows.

He took one of the band-aids from the packet, removed its wrappings, peeled the small tabs protecting the adhesive portions of the strip and placed the cushioned portion against the small wound on his finger. It was then a simple matter to wrap the two adhesive portions of the bandage around the finger. The first time he did this he found that he had pulled them too tight and had to peel them apart and reapply the bandage. This second application proved much more comfortable. Mr. Barbicane slipped the package containing the remaining band-aids into his jacket pocket then looked up and toward the window.

The rain was being driven against the glass in pounding sheets that undulated across the tall windows making them look like the surface of a lake during a storm. When the wind slacked and eddied, the drops would slide down the glass only to be caught by the next gust that drove them up and across then down then sideways again. All detail was lost of the alley beyond the windows. Mr. Barbicane had a sense of the outlines of several planes and the lights of the other terminal finger multiplied and distorted by the rain, but it was a confused picture. Lightning continued to spike the horizon.

A few yards away from him two uniformed ticket agents coordinated the check-ins and answered questions about the weather delay and when did they think the storm would clear and explained how the airport was essentially shut down at the moment, nothing coming in, nothing going out, and that airport rules prevented workers to venture out of the terminals for tasks such as food and cabin service, baggage loading and unloading and particularly refueling because of the danger of lightening. So, you see, they had no idea when the flight would leave because once the storm had passed the airport would have to go through this period of reawakening. Passengers would move away, dissatisfied by the answer and annoyed at these women who had no control over the situation.

Mr. Barbicane sat by the window, watching the storm, confident that at some point the weather would improve and he would be able to continue his journey. There was no real rush. He wasn’t expected until the following afternoon. His schedule required leaving a day early and staying at the hotel airport in Pittsburgh then renting a car the next morning and continuing the rest of the trip by road.

The air beyond the window was suddenly filled with white light. The planes and buildings were illuminated from above by an intense magnesium glare. For an instant the jet way was strobed into intense detail. The silver and blue aircraft at the gates, the carts and vehicles tucked under the terminal overhang, the markings on the concrete, everything blasted by the sort of light one would expect if the moon were to one night explode in the sky.

A heartbeat later, the thunder arrived. It cracked like breaking wood at first then stumbled into a concussive, rolling cannonade that stopped everyone in the concourse in mid-stride, pulled them up as they walked or talked on their cell phones or punched at their laptops or sipped their lattes, and made them cringe and duck and pull in their heads, responding to the heavenly explosion with an atavistic reflex that linked them all with our time in the caves. The thunder rolled and echoed and called to itself for what felt like an eternity to the people in the concourse. Then, as the fusillade faded and the rain beating on the windows became the dominant sound, people straightened up and unclenched. Some people laughed, a nervous, testing laugh.

“Jesus.”

Mr. Barbicane turned at the sound of this evocation and saw one of the two women at the ticket counter, her hand pressed to her heart. She had her hand to her heart. He’d never actually seen anyone in that pose before, at least not someone outside of a motion picture. He’d assumed it was one of those invented gestures, the sort of thing they come up with for people to do in movies to symbolize some emotion for which there is no real symbol.

But there she was, a very real woman, her right hand pressed against her bosom. He had discovered the gesture occurring spontaneously in the wild. Or had he? Mr. Barbicane wondered if this gesture of amazement and possibly fear was instinctive or acquired. Did it well unbidden from the deeper parts of the brain or was it a case of having seen the same gesture so many times in countless movies and television programs and illustrations it had been imprinted on the woman’s mind as the thing to do, the appropriate display, and after years and years of ordinary life something finally happened to trigger this response? In that moment of noise and light had the black and white image of a thousand startled actresses overcome any natural reaction in her and came forth in melodramatic detail?

She stood there a few yards from Mr. Barbicane in her pressed blue uniform and carefully molded blonde hair highlighted with streaks of lighter blonde, a woman of perhaps forty, with her right hand touching the skin at the base of her throat, visible above the open collar of her white blouse. She wore an emerald ring on one finger and there was a loose bracelet set with the same sort of stones around her wrist. Mr. Barbicane turned so quickly at the word “Jesus” he managed to catch the last instant before the tips of her manicured fingers, polished in white and a pale pink in a combination he once saw advertised in the window of a nail salon as a “French Tip” that he saw the bracelet slide down her wrist, catching on the metal button at the cuff of her tailored jacket. In spite of her modern dress and appearance, the gesture felt Victorian, like something conjured from another era hidden within her, the subconscious remains of perhaps afternoons spent in tea shops with maiden aunts during summers of banishment to upstate New York.

Long forgotten were the walks along the tourist crowded streets of Lake George in the company of her father’s sister who never married in spite of the opportunities available to her during the war. She had seen pictures of the aunt taken in the forties, and earlier at the 1939 World’s Fair and thought she was pretty and almost adventurous looking. But all adventure had disappeared by the time they walked together in those summers when the family packed up and went north on the thruway on the way to the State Fair in Syracuse.

While her brothers played in the lake and her parents slept in, she and her aunt would walk from the clapboard house, along the sidewalkless streets to the gaudy main drag of the village. What she wanted was ice cream or a Belgian Waffle or some taffy. What she would get would be thin amber tea and a tasteless scone set on a paper doily and looking like some sort of pale, raisin dotted meteorite.

Where had the fire gone? Where had the smile she saw on the face of that girl standing in front of the Trylon and Perisphere? What happened to turn that pretty girl into a maiden aunt? She wanted to know almost as much as she was afraid to know. But she never asked and now it was too late. Too late by decades.

The ticket agent at the counter took her hand away from her heart and looked around as if to see if anyone had caught her in the gesture. She didn’t see Mr. Barbicane who turned his attention back to the storm beyond the windows realizing that his flight delay would be a substantial one. Good.

There was more thunder, but it was beyond the airport. The rain, however, remained torrential. Mr. Barbicane stood and went to the window and looked down into the alley. Below he could see a grating, part of the system meant to carry rain water away. But the grating was overwhelmed and water seems to be issuing from it rather than draining into it. He put his hand on the glass and found it cold. Taking it away he saw his palm and fingers rendered in condensation on the inside of the window. He watched as the image faded, first the fingers (with a horizontal band of nothing where the band-aide was) then the shape of the palm. When this was all gone he turned away from his reflection in the window and returned to his seat.

Now the wisdom of his taking the extra bag lunch paid off. He would eat it now, as an early supper, saving him the expense of buying food from a terminal concessionaire.

Chapter Twelve

The aisle quickly filled with passengers anxious to leave the plane. Mr. Barbicane remained in his seat. He reached forward and took his complimentary meal bag from the seat pocket in front of him. The woman next to him stood and opened the overhead bin from which she pulled a bag he couldn’t see from this angle. The cabin door was opened and the passengers started filing out the jet way. He pretended to focus on the list of contents in his lunch bag…a croissant turkey sandwich with low-fat mayonnaise, a cheese-snax, another chocolate chip cookie, and an apple…until the young woman had folded herself into the march of passengers and was well on her way out of the plane.

Mr. Barbicane looked up as she walked away. He saw her back and her neck and watched as she shouldered her carry on bag and reached back with both hands to tighten the fabric securing her ponytail. She turned at the forward galley and left the plane and Mr. Barbicane never saw her again.

He was therefore unaware of the argument she had in the car with her boyfriend Rory who had driven in the rain to meet her on the other side of security. Rory was very happy to see her, but thought he could tell from her expression that she was upset by something. He asked her if the flight had been all right and she said it had she was just tired and she just wanted to get going. He tried to take her bag, but she wouldn’t let him have it.

The couple did not speak as they made their way out of the terminal and across the access road to one of the short term parking lots. Rory kept glancing over, to look at the side of her face, to try to get some sense of what was going on in her mind. But all he saw when he looked was her profile, as pretty as always, but disturbingly set. He’d seen this look before and it was usually brought about by some thoughtless blunder on his part. He was at a loss now. He hadn’t seen her in two weeks, but they spoke on the phone every day and emailed each other more often than that. All conversations and messages had been pleasant and she said she was looking forward to getting on a plane and seeing him and he had gone out of his way to get to the airport on time, leaving extra early, cutting out of the office dangerously early because he didn’t want the weather to delay him.

Now, she showed every indication of being angry at him and he had done nothing. This, he realized, was the only irritating thing about her character he could single out; the way she put him on edge about his behavior, the way she was ready to punish him for something he did or said or seemed to be saying or probably wanted to do or say.

She threw her bag into the back of his car and climbed into the passenger seat, still not talking. He got behind the wheel and drove the leased Mercedes convertible through the maze of the parking structure, paid at the gate and eased onto the loop road that would take them to the expressway. And all through this she was silent. He knew she was angry just as much as he knew, for certain this time, that he had done nothing to merit that anger.

He reached over and put his right hand on her left thigh. She said nothing. All right. Then he started to ease his hand along the curve and moving it upward, finally slipping his hand between her thighs, along the inner seam of her jeans.

That’s when she said, “Don’t.”

He left his hand there. She said “Don’t” again and started to cross her legs. He pulled his hand away.

Out of the corner of her eye he saw her cross her legs then uncross them and cross them the other way, tucking herself against the car door. He saw her put her hands on her thighs and then move them away as if burned. He watched her slide her hands under her legs and sit on them.

He had no idea what was going on inside her head at that moment. And if he did, it would have only served to confuse him further.

Chapter Eleven

While the senior cabin attendant took the opportunity to be the first to welcome Mr. Barbicane and the other passengers to the Dallas-Ft. Worth area and remind them that this was a particularly expansive airport and therefore it would take the pilot considerable time to reach the gate and until that time, until the moment when the nose of the plane was tucked into place and the segmented corridor of the jet way was secured and the canopy folded over the top of the aircraft and the door was about to be open, Mr. Barbicane and his fellow travelers were asked, no, stronger than asked, requested, for their own safety, to stay seated with their seatbelts in place, while this mixture of welcome and warning came through the public address speakers, bringing with it the additional caveat that even once the aircraft had stopped and the light had been turned off and all would be free to stand and reclaim their luggage, even then care should be taken in opening overhead compartment in which items may have shifted during flight, Mr. Barbicane continued to look out his window.

Out there the lights of the various airplanes, luggage tractors, security vehicles, gas trucks, the lights of the runways themselves, were echoed by vertical smears in the wet pavement of the taxiway. Beyond the airport he could see the horizon compressing, squeezing down against the Earth as the thunderstorm he’d just passed through closed in on the airport. There were stuttering eruptions of white light within the clouds and the thin strikes of lightning that actually managed to escape the storm and lance down were impossibly bright, and seemed, at this distance, no thicker than the width of the cut on the side of Mr. Barbicane’s index finger.

While he had arrived, he had not arrived at his final destination so the immunity of his status as traveler was undiminished. He was a citizen of Airportia with all the rights and privileges associated with that status. He could move with absolute freedom within in the airport, having already passed security and having no plans to go outside the warmth of the secure sections of the terminal. Coffee and a snack were waiting for him. A small, albeit overpriced, package of band-aids was waiting for him, untold magazines and the great tidal surge of his fellow citizens working their way from one coded door to the next, going from arrival to departing, going from A-36 to C-19. Moving not from place to place, but from one set of coordinates to another set. Navigating the polished floors and flat carpeted landscape, usually covered by a roof which seems not attached to the building, but floating above it, letting light in at the sides.

Few things in life pleased Mr. Barbicane more than walking with his bag from one gate to another in an airport in a city he would see only in pleasant pictures affixed to the walls of the corridors he transversed. These pictures were meant to communicate the wonders of the particular city, how it was a place of industry and entertainment, commerce and relaxation, that the place was both modern yet rooted in the solid tradition of history. There was usually a night photo of the cityscape with its tall buildings punctured by lights. There was always a photograph of two people, a man and a woman, the man in a suit and tie, the woman in a red dress, seated at a table in a restaurant with a candle set between them, the candle flame caught in some sort of filter that split its light along two axis like the traditional depiction of the ornament on the top of a Christmas tree. In this photo the woman is always holding a glass of wine and she is always laughing. There would also be a photo of a meeting taking place during daylight in one of the skyscrapers depicted in the night shot. In that photo a group of people, both men and women, people of all ethic backgrounds, none of them old, sat at a long table placed against floor to ceiling windows overlooking the city while one of their number stood by a chart on an easel and pointed at positive information on a graph. There would be photographs of families with children engaged in some of the many recreational opportunities afforded within easy reach of the places of commerce. Sometimes these recreational opportunities were of an outdoor, natural sort. Sometimes they indicated that a large amusement complex was located near by.

While the intent of these photographs was to differentiate the glories of one city from another, Mr. Barbicane took great comfort in their uniformity. They wanted him to know that America had ceased to be a threatening amalgam of difference and conflicting opinion. It was now a place of coherent thought, directed toward industry and pleasure. What particular regional difference there might be had been contained and focused, made familiar and safe. He had never seen any of the cities he saw depicted in these murals that graced the hallways of Airportia. Perhaps they were all the same city. Perhaps they were no city at all. Perhaps the models in the photographs were selected for their attractive looks and ability to communicate comfort and were photographed without knowing where it was their faces were being used or to what civic purpose, photographed in some general location that could be made to look like different cities, subtly different cities, always familiar in their subtly difference.

Some might consider this blandness and take offense. Mr. Barbicane did not. He saw it as a restful leveling off of America, a smoothing of differences. They represented less an actual city and more of the ideal of a city. A traveler who never crossed the security line, never claimed his or her baggage and took a cab into the heart of the place, there to do business or seek pleasure, would look at these pictures and take away the reassuring knowledge or at least the reassuring believe that somewhere the difficulties of American cities had been resolved and citizens lived in harmony. There was the potential of happiness anywhere because happiness had been attained here…wherever here might be. Such a traveler might leave the airport of the city he never visited with a sense of nostalgia, possibly longing for the things seen only in the large, bright photographs, usually in the form of tremendous transparencies illuminated from behind. He would remember what he didn’t see and, perhaps, in time, forget that he hadn’t actually seen them. They would then move from the memory of seeing a photograph to the memory of the thing photographed. As one ages, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the difference between the two, and the value of being able to make such a distinction is arguable at best.

A man in a yellow rain slicker with a hood and pants of the same water repellant material came into Mr. Barbicane’s view as the plane turned down the wide alley between two terminal fingers. The man held a flashlight in each hand, the end of which was extended by a plastic cylinder that glowed an imperative red. He used these two frozen torches to direct the aircraft into a second turn which left it facing the terminal finger. Gestures were made with the flashlights as the airplane slowed then stopped. The guardian angel then approached the plane and was lost from Mr. Barbicane’s sight. The last he saw of him he was ducking down to walk under the belly of the machine.

There was a bump as the jet way nuzzled the forward cabin door. Then the pilot turned off the FASTEN SEATBELT light and Mr. Barbicane lifted the face of the buckle to release the apparatus that had held him as he flew.

Chapter Ten

Mr. Barbicane had assumed the young woman was having a dream and that something in the dream was disturbing her. She shifted in her seat and pulled her legs together. Then she closed her mouth and the small star blinked out and he had won his little game and could look away. As he did he realized she was waking, opening her eyes, but she did not catch him looking at her. There would be no need for conversation.

He looked out at the sky. They were flying into the afternoon now, losing hours as they went, and the sun was far behind them and traveling in the opposite direction. The further east they went, the darker the clouds became and the darkness came from something other than the absence of light. They were becoming more compressed, more solid, boiling up in their path as they started their initial decent into the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, a place famous for its thunder storms.

As the young woman next to him took out her earbuds, unclipped the iPod from her belt and wrapped the white wires around the small pink machine, the pilot came back on the public address system to inform them they would be passing through some “shower activity” as they dipped lower and lower on the approach to the airport and that there was the possibility of some turbulence. The time had come for the passengers to remain seated for the duration of the flight as the cabin attendants set to collecting the last of the service items and generally preparing the cabin for landing.

Mr. Barbicane checked his seatback and seatbelt then turned again to the window. The aircraft dropped below a floor of clouds the color snow takes on in the gutters of large cities two days after a storm.

Beneath the layer of old snow was a landscape of boiling gray mountains. The plane shuddered and rain smeared horizontally across the outer window. The cabin was filled with the thick green light of a thunderstorm, that late summer artificial twilight.

Mr. Barbicane had once been on a plane landing at this very airport when it was struck by lightning, a common occurrence in the region. It felt to those on board as if the side of the aircraft had been struck by a large pick-up truck going in excess of sixty miles an hour. But the sound of the collision was not followed by any indicators that the aircraft was in trouble. It never lost trim or power and continued on its steady decent. No masks dropped from overhead compartments, no cabin attendants charged through the aisles collecting shoes and eyeglasses. The passengers, Mr. Barbicane included, found themselves in a momentary condition of suspended emotion, wondering if they should go ahead and panic or if that would only end up a terrible embarrassment. He felt the cabin around him was filled with people who had filled their lungs in anticipation of a scream, but now wondered if they should let rip or await further developments one way or the other.

A moment and the co-pilot of the struck aircraft came on the public address system and stated, quite calmly, that the plane had indeed been struck by lightning, that the charge had been dissipated over the metal skin of the aircraft and that all was well.

With which some three hundred people exhaled. Mr. Barbicane found the experience exhilarating. His fear was of pain, not death or any addendum panic.

Outside the window it grew increasingly darker than the four o’clock local time would suggest.

As Mr. Barbicane watched the individual tears slide laterally across the window, the aircraft sank below the immediate layer of the storm. In the distance the horizon was a narrow band of bright gray, light caught between the clouds and the ground. They were getting slightly ahead of the storm as they dropped closer and closer to the ground and the familiar airport indicators of track houses, flat industrial buildings and then massive rent-a-car parking lots came into view.

The thunk of the landing gear doors opening and the whine of the gear’s hydraulic progress vibrated up from the cabin floor and into Mr. Barbicane’s feet. They crossed the last loop of access road, then the blast fence, then he watched the rain slick runway rise up to meet the aircraft.

When all three landing gear clusters were on the ground the pilot reversed thrust and Mr. Barbicane felt himself gently pulled forward by inertia. He had returned to the planet, but he was still a passenger.

Chapter Nine

She had fallen asleep during the Andante of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto in A minor for Violin and Orchestra, BWV 1041. The beginning of the andante sounds like you’ve joined in a long climb up a hill. It didn’t seem so steep at the beginning of the walk, in fact it isn’t really terribly steep, but the rise is continuous and the distance to the top of the hill is longer than you expected. So the orchestra seems to be taking weary steps as you listen. They and you have grown very tired during a journey that was not supposed to require so much work. You were simply walking and you saw a hill and there might be trees at the top of the hill or a single tree. A single cherry tree white with blossoms so white they couldn’t possibly be real and you started walking up to the hill, toward this impossible tree at the crest, white blossoms against a blue sky, the landscape beyond the crest unknown to you. And you start to climb, climbing up the hill, looking down at the ground as you climb, sometimes looking up at the tree. Your breathing starts to reflect the unanticipated effort and after a few minutes you realize the hill is steeper than you think and maybe this wasn’t such a good idea and you might as well turn around and head back down before you go too far and you’re probably late anyway.

Then the solo violin arrives with one of those clear, simple, profound melodies of Bach’s as if to encourage the rest of the instruments that the struggle is worth the effort and the top of the hill is worth attaining. And the orchestra responds to this. There’s renewed effort after the first violin passage as they push on to the top of the hill. The violin returns again, encouraging, promising, leading. And each time it does, the rest of the instruments draw something from the encouragement and push on. The movement is made up of these alternating passages of effort and promise, struggle and assurance, leading you up a hill. Bach pulls you along, toward the top, toward the cherry tree with its crown of blossoms that must be made of tissue paper because nothing in nature could be that white. Somewhere in your mind you realize Bach is long dead, that the music that’s calling to you is almost three hundred years old and that Bach was only thirty-two when he wrote it and what the hell did you do at thirty-two that could survive three centuries? And still you climb the hill. The music won’t let you do anything else.

But the dream the young woman was having had nothing to do with Bach. The parts of her brain listening to the music were not in communication with the parts producing the dream.

In the dream she was standing in front of the movie theaters up at Universal City Walk waiting for her father. This was odd because she hated going to the movies up at City Walk and because her father was dead. But dreams exist outside logic, or else they have their own logic which states that since a thing is happening it can’t be impossible so you better get with the program.

She stands there in the middle of all the lights and sound, the bad music blasting out from the giant television screen on which is projected a music video almost in sync with the music pouring out of the speakers. She hates this place. She had her ass grabbed in a crowd outside Gladstone’s in this place. And somebody once tried to steal her purse. Why would her father want to go to the movies here?

Her father shows up and he looks the way he did when she was a little girl, when she watched him march in the veteran’s parade down the middle of Maple Avenue. She was proud of him, of the ribbons and decorations on his jacket, proud of his veteran’s cap. Much later that night he came home drunk and pounded around the first floor of the house and scared her so much that she tried to pull the table next to her bed in front of the door, but that only managed to knock her lamp that had a carrousel for a base off the table. It fell to the floor and the carrousel broke and the noise was enough to bring her father stumbling up the stairs and she tried to keep him out, she was so afraid of him, she’d never heard him really drunk before and he really didn’t get drunk often, but there’d been a big blow out at the volunteer firehouse after the parade. She got in bed and pulled the covers over her and started to cry. Her father came in and asked what she was crying about, but she was too scared to answer. Then he saw the broken lamp on the floor and imagined that was what she was crying about. He leaned down and scooped up the parts of the broken lamp in his hands and stood. He stood there, weaving, still very drunk, with the pieces of the broken lamp in his hands and telling her to stop crying because he would fix it. He’d fix the lamp and everything would be okay. And as he said this, pieces of the lamp were falling and hitting the floor and breaking into smaller and smaller pieces and even drunk he knew repairing this lamp was something he probably couldn’t do. He just wanted her to stop crying.

He was wearing his veteran’s cap as he came through the crowd at City Walk and went to her and hugged her and told her he was sorry he was late. It wasn’t that he hadn’t died. They both knew he was dead, but now he was back and that seemed perfectly normal.

Rory was by the box office windows. He had their tickets and told them they had to hurry because they were late. Rory put his arm around her and kissed her harder than he should have kissed her in front of her father, but her father didn’t say anything and Rory didn’t say anything and the three of them went into the theater and found the auditorium they were looking for and went inside.

The inside was not like the real inside of the theaters at City Walk. Those theaters didn’t have balconies, but this theater did and they sat in the front row of the balcony. The lights were already down and the movie had already started. It was a movie she wanted Rory and her father to see. It was one of her favorite movies, but she didn’t recognize any of what was on the screen.

On screen people were on a very large airplane with no roof. The airplane was open on top, like a big old London bus, flying through the sky. She recognized some of the people on the airplane as the actors from her favorite movie and assumed that this must have been how the actors arrived to be in the movie and she’d just never seen this part before. She had a copy of the movie on DVD but she’d never seen this scene before. She turned to explain this to her father and Rory and that’s when she saw that her boyfriend and her father were kissing. On the mouth.

Rory, who was seated next to her, was twisted around in his seat and he was kissing her father and her father was kissing Rory back. Her father had one arm around Rory and his other hand cradling the back of Rory’s neck and Rory had one arm around her father’s shoulders and the other hand between her father’s legs. And they were doing this right in front of her, right in front of all the people in the balcony and there were suddenly lots of people in the balcony and the lights were on. The movie was playing, but the lights were on so everybody could see what was happening. And the thing that bothered her wasn’t that her father was kissing a man, it’s that he was kissing her boyfriend.

She told Rory to stop, but he acted like he didn’t hear her. He didn’t stop kissing her father, he just got more into it. She watched Rory move out of his seat, all the time keeping a lip-lock on her father, and turn to face the other man, getting down on his knees in front of the other man, getting between his open legs. Rory and her father held each other’s face in their hands and kissed with an ardor she’d never seen before. It was so intense that, in spite of who she was looking at, she realized she was getting a little turned on by the situation which, even in the context of a dream struck her as pushing the limits of acceptable behavior.

Then things got weird. She felt that sexual warmth growing in her and that was familiar enough, but then she felt something she never felt before which was a sense of growth between her own legs. A sense of some part of her filling with blood and taking on weight and dimension. She knew what this was even though she knew it was impossible. There was no question that she now had a penis and that it was becoming profoundly erect. She looked down and could actually see the shape of it growing down the inside of the leg of her jeans, pressed against her inner thigh. She didn’t want people to catch her looking at what was happening to her so she looked up, at the screen.

But what was on the screen was what was going on in the balcony. Up on the screen she was sitting in her seat, her hands grasping the arm rests. She pulled her knees shut to hide what was happening, but that just made things feel…interesting. She closed her eyes and concentrated on keeping her hands on the arm rests. If she took her hands off the arm rests she wasn’t sure she could control where they’d end up and frankly she found the situation complicated enough just the way it was.

The thing about dreams is that they’re irrefutable while you’re in them. Common sense would dictate that she had not in fact suddenly acquired a penis, but common sense holds no sway in dreams and the realization that it was impossible for her to have a penis is overwhelmed by the seemingly practical questions of what would her life be like now that she had one.

What would she do? How would she live? How would she explain this to Rory? Rory who was at that minute continuing to deeply French her father. And people were looking at her. Oh, God. Everybody was looking at her.

Now there was a trembling, a shaking. At first she thought it was something else happening to her body, that the vibration was coming from her. Then she realized the rumbling, the shaking was coming up through the bottom of the seat and through her and she knew with that certainty you know things in dreams that the balcony was about to collapse.

And through this confusion, the humiliating betrayal by her boyfriend surpassed only by the betrayal of her own body, rose familiar music which, after a moment, she recognized as “Sheep May Safely Graze,” a Bach cantata she loved and kept in a power rotation on her iPod. The music was not from outside, not from the theater, but was inside her head and with that realization the terror drained out of her, drained down along her legs, through her feet and out of her body. Bach was coming to her rescue again as he had so often in the past. He would protect her from whatever was going on and save her.

Sweeter and more dependable than God was Johann.

Safe in the hands of Bach, the dream retreated and she opened her eyes, just as the man in the seat next to her turned to look out his window at the clouds that had darkened and turned to lead while she was asleep.

Chapter Eight

Later, Mr. Barbicane was awakened from a mercifully dreamless sleep by a shudder running through the length of the aircraft. He looked out the window and saw that the clouds had grown darker as he crossed the country. There was a mechanical tone amplified over the public address system and the FASTEN SEAT BELTS light was illuminated. A moment later one of the cabin attendants came on the address system to inform the passengers that it was the captain who turned on the light and this was because of unstable weather conditions developing ahead of them.

Mr. Barbicane sighed and looked down. Both his tray table and the tray table of the woman next to him were in their closed and locked position so he could once again see her legs. He could also see a length of white wire running from the iPod clipped to the belt of her shorts, snaking across her thigh then leading up along her chest. She was listening to music. Mr. Barbicane thought this might be a good opportunity to try to look at her, to see if he could hold her features in focus.

Slowly, Mr. Barbicane turned and lifted his head, his eyes following the white string of the earbud chord as it split just above the young woman’s cleavage. He continued to trace the wire closest to him as it climbed toward her face. First he saw her chin and her throat. He could even detect the pulse thrumming through the veins in her neck. Her jaw led him to the side of her head and to the beginning of her hair which was a dark red, streaked with something lighter, and pulled back and up away from her head in a ponytail secured with a loop of green fabric. A wisp of hair tendriled down at the side of her head with carefully designed carelessness. There were two earrings in the earlobe Mr. Barbicane could see. The lower was a dangling diamond shaped object, crusted with red and blue stones and looking not antique but like something that wanted to remind you of an antique. Above this was a simple diamond stud. Her eyes were closed as she listened to the music delivered almost directly to her brain by the tiny speakers inserted in her ears. Her nose was correctly proportioned and had apparently undergone no surgical alteration. He could see the side of her mouth. Her lips were tinted a faint reddish brown sort of color. She was young. Early twenties he guessed, but he was very bad at that sort of thing. Certainly the face he saw was smooth and even, not overly made up, not pulled tight behind the ears.

As Mr. Barbicane watched, the young woman’s lips came apart, her jaw dropping slightly. He imagined he could almost hear the moist snap of the lips separating, but knew that would be impossible. The young woman had fallen asleep listening to her music.

The plane bounced again, but the motion did not wake the young woman. Rather it merely served to lull her head downward and slightly toward Mr. Barbicane. He looked at the sleeping woman and was very happy to see that the elements of her face were in proper relation to each other and showed no signs of shifting or fading as he concentrated on them.

Her mouth remained open and the beam of her reading light caught a drop of saliva on one white lower front incisor creating a pin-point of light as bright as a star. Mr. Barbicane found he neither wanted to look away nor did he expect to find he was capable of looking away from the small point of light set between the young woman’s lips even if he tried.

He knew she could wake up at any moment and find him looking at her face, at her mouth in particular, but still he would not or could not look away. And, with each passing second, as the likelihood of her waking and seeing him looking at her grew, an unfamiliar and giddy sense of excitement blossomed in Mr. Barbicane’s heart. He’d never experienced anything like it. It seemed wicked for some reason, but, if pressed, he could not say why it seemed so wicked. And it seemed terrible forward of him. Worse than forward: Bold.

To continue looking was folly, unquestionable folly. But still he looked and still the bubble of wicked pleasure nervously grew to fill his chest.

He began to bargain with himself. I will look until the star goes out, he thought. He would continue to look at her face, at the skin covering her eyes, at the thin brows like the narrow wings of some impossibly small seabird, until she closed her mouth or moved or something else happened to disturb the arrangement that caused the light to shiny from her tooth. If she woke and saw him, it was out of his hands.

Her chest rose and fell gently, moving the wires of her earbuds, and Mr. Barbicane wondered what music was playing to entertain her sleeping mind.

Chapter Seven

With his auxiliary bag lunch in the pocket of the seat pocket in front of him, Mr. Barbicane happily contemplated his first class entrée, a gift given only to the handful of people in the forward cabin. He had selected the Chicken Breast Italiano served on a bed of fettuccini noodles with a small side salad, roll and a can of Diet Coke. He had decided against the Fiesta Shrimp Kabob and the Lite Snack Cheese Plate.

The chicken breast, grilled with a topping of “Italian” seasonings rested on a confusion of noodles in a rectangular dish of white plastic. A chocolate chip cookie wrapped in clear plastic and a salad, with a small foil packet of creamy Caesar dressing in a slightly deeper dish, were at opposite corners of the plastic tray the cabin attendant put on Mr. Barbicane’s tray table, reaching across the young lady who he had heard to order the Lite Snack Cheese Plate.

There was a time in this great nation of ours when people in the first class cabins of aircraft ate with metal utensils and drank from actual glasses while those who had spent less for their tickets ate with plastic utensils and drank from plastic cups at the rear of the aircraft. Political and religious extremism and nightmarish tragedy have democratized the dining hierarchy on airplanes. Now everyone eats with and drinks from plastic. Plastic is believed to be less lethal than metal although Mr. Barbicane took little comfort in this distinction. The white picnic fork and knife on the tray in front of him added no additional sense of safety or well-being. They served only as another reminder of how, when faced with tragedy, we often come up with the most amazingly wrongheaded reactions.

Mr. Barbicane unwrapped the golden foil around his small Scrabble tile of butter, broke open the surprisingly cold roll, cut off a rectangle of butter with his plastic knife and started to apply it to the roll. Since both roll and butter were very cold spreading was not an easy process. He pressed harder, trying to force the butter to flatten against the soft insides of the roll. But this only managed to compress the airy roll against the inside of the crust. He pressed harder.

Then Mr. Barbican’s hands slipped and the serrated edge of the plastic knife cut across the side of his left index finger just at the first knuckle. There was a startlingly precise lick of pain. His eyes clicked to the left to see if the woman next to him had noticed the slip. But her hands were busy inspecting the contents of her snack plate (several plastic wrapped packets of multigrain crackers, a small plastic tub of pale cheese, a yellow brick of something he assumed was cheddar, a number of grapes and an apple) and nothing in her focused industry indicated she was aware anything had happened to him.

He looked at the site of the injury. Perhaps he hadn’t cut all that deep. Then, after what seemed a remarkably long time, a thin diagonal of red, less than a quarter of an inch in length, appeared at the edge of Mr. Barbicane’s index finger. The line became more distinct then thickened, then glistened as blood made its way to the surface of his skin. He put down the piece of roll he was holding and put the finger to his lips. There wasn’t enough blood to taste. Then Mr. Barbicane took tore off part of his paper napkin and wrapped it around his finger to form an impromptu bandage, holding it in place with his middle finger and putting pressure on the site of the injury with his thumb.

This made the manipulating of his knife and fork slightly more difficult, but not so difficult as to prevent Mr. Barbicane from completing his meal. He set the roll and butter aside and started to cut his chicken into manageable bites. He thought this would permit him to put the knife down and eat the bulk of his meal with his fork only. It did.

He opened the foil package of dressing and squeezed the contents over the small salad of green lettuce, one cherry tomato and four small brown croutons. He then proceeded to alternate, with no real pattern or rhythm to the alternations, between the salad, the chicken and the noodles underneath the chicken. To this rotation he would occasional add a sip of his Diet Coke, a bite of his roll (he had decided against any additional attempts at buttering) and pauses to look out the window at the intense white landscape of clouds. In this fashion, Mr. Barbicane consumed his meal and felt satisfied by it.

When he was finished eating, he put down his plastic knife and fork and carefully took the napkin off his cut finger. The cut was no longer bleeding. Now there was a thread of congealed blood matching the red stain on the napkin he saw when he took it away. It looked and felt like a paper cut. He decided to buy a package of Band-Aids when the plane landed at Dallas-Ft. Worth. This would protect his finger from subsequent injury, help prevent the possibility of infection, and give him something else to do at the airport.

The cut on Mr. Barbicane’s finger was typical of the sort of pain and damage he had experienced so far in life. While his childhood had contained the appropriate illnesses and their associated discomfort, he had broken no bones, experienced no great traumas. His youth was similarly without medical note. Now, as he moved deeper into middle age, he had started to wonder if this eventless life might not be the blessing it first appeared to be. He had experienced little physical pain, no hospital stays or lengthy home confinement. He had needed no procedures or drugs with potential side-effects. Now, all those things lay ahead of him as his life drew closer to its ending. He could fully expect pain and hospitals and drugs and realized he had no preparation for these eventualities. Now, every stubbed toe, every minor cut was not so much an inconvenience as it was a threat, a promise that there was more ahead and that he was completely unprepared for it.

If he’d broken an arm as a boy or perhaps survived a serious automobile accident in his resilient youth, he would have some memory, some physiological context to help him get through what was waiting for him. As unreasonable as it might seem, Mr. Barbicane had started to believe that he had not avoided pain and discomfort so much as he had delayed it, deferred it to a later time and that time would be here sooner than he would wish. Then all the misery he could have averaged out over the years would be delivered to him in one crushing blow at a time when his ability to recover and bounce back was rapidly diminishing.

This contemplation not so much of mortality but of pain and suffering would have been bad enough, but recently it had started to crowd in on the thing that gave Mr. Barbicane so much pleasure. Travel. He had started to consider what might happen if that sudden visitation of cumulative pain were to arrive while he was away from home. What if, while at his happiest, he was struck down?

He tried to keep a cool head about this prospect, but the abstract concept of being “caught” in mid-step by pain was quickly replaced with disturbing fantasies of possible scenarios for the dreaded event. Mr. Barbicane thought about what it would be like to be on board an aircraft, such as the one he was now on, when he was found out and attacked through some agency (perhaps contaminated food or some toxic substance on the plastic cutlery). He had no sense of what real pain felt like and he was terrified he might discover the reality while five miles above the world he so enjoyed leaving. Or what if the attack occurred during a flight over a large body of water? Mr. Barbicane had never flown over an ocean and had no plans to do so in the immediate future, but that didn’t prevent him from considering what might happen if he was caught in some medical vice half-way between two places with no hope of an intermediate stop.

As frightening as the prospect of pain locating him on an airplane in flight was to Mr. Barbicane, he dreaded getting sick alone in a hotel room even more. Even though medical help would surely be more readily accessible to him, the idea of growing ill in a hotel room in a strange city elevated him to a high state of agitation. And this was such a cruel fantasy because he so loved hotel rooms.

Nothing, not even flying, gave him as much pleasure as being in an anonymous hotel room. And to think about being sick and in pain while in one of his beloved rooms…well, the thought itself could arguably bring on the condition imagined. Mr. Barbicane realized he could make himself sick by simply thinking about what it would be like. And he did think about it, more and more it seemed. He did not think of himself as an imaginative man, but the lurid detail in which this particular nightmare presented itself to him were, he thought, beyond the inventive capabilities of his own mind. And by nightmare one shouldn’t assume that these terrors were restricted to Mr. Barbicane’s sleep. Often lately they had started to assemble themselves in his waking mind in those moments when consciousness is unfocused by thought or task. Then, unnoticed at first, the elements of the drama would collect in the mind of its unwilling star.

Mr. Barbicane saw himself in a hotel room, in bed, feeling first uneasy, then uncomfortable. Then he sensed pain, beginning in his stomach (it always began in his stomach when he imagined it) and radiating out. That is to say he sensed what he imagined pain might feel like, but realized he was creating an empty approximation of the thing he feared. Pain, he knew, was indescribable. And if you couldn’t describe it, how could you ever end it?

The imagined pain grows in the imagined Mr. Barbicane. He looks at the clock radio and it is always four a.m. He throws back the covers and sits on the edge of the bed thinking he’ll go to the bathroom in the hope of some magical relief brought about by simply being in the bathroom. He stands, tries to straighten up and can’t. Pain keeps him from standing up straight. He walks, stooped over, around the foot of the bed, past the amoire with the cable television and the mini-bar, past his open suitcase on the rack between the mirrored closet doors and the chest of drawers, to reach the bathroom.

Bathrooms in hotel rooms are not like the bathrooms in homes. The poor ones are grim stalls for hygiene and elimination, the fine ones are places of luxury and conveniences. But neither kind will ever be mistaken for something found in a home.

The imagined Mr. Barbicane steps up to the imagined vanity and mirror and turns on a light. He looks at himself in the mirror and sees his face is colorless and fearful. He takes a glass and fills it from the tap. Then he takes some aspirin from a bottle in his traveling bag and swallows them. The pain grows like something inflating inside him, displacing his organs, pressurizing his blood till it pounds in his head. First he sits on the edge of the tub, then he slides down the side to sit on the floor, then he slowly, very slowly falls to one side and ends up hugging himself on the floor of a bathroom in a hotel room in a strange city.

Perhaps he dies in the hotel room. Mr. Barbicane always manages to stop the fantasy before it goes that far. But every time it conjures itself in his mind, it takes more of his will to stop it. And so many things can start his mind on these unhealthy and unsolicited trajectories. A bottle of aspirin on a counter, the sound of a siren during a quiet night, or the contemplation of an insignificant cut on the side of his finger.

Chapter Six

Mr. Barbicane savored his assent. He looked down at the retreating Earth and, although he knew such a thing was unlikely, felt he could actually detect a diminishing of the gravitational pull of the receding planet. He felt this at the base of his brain and across his chest. He could almost feel himself rising slightly in his seat, the belt tightening across his lap.

Outside the small window cars and streets and people dropped away, lost their details, their reality, their ability to affect him. The landing gear retracted into the body of the aircraft with a straining hydraulic whine and the solid shutting of metal doors. Flaps were pulled back into the trailing edge of the wings and they all continued upward, no longer banking, but still climbing. Climbing out of the valley that now could be seen to be covered with a thin brown layer of trapped air.

Higher still, through the first thin clouds then the great white layer of overcast which, when pierced, looked to Mr. Barbicane like an Brobdignagian version of the cotton used to decorate communities of miniature houses established under Christmas trees and around mirrors on the dining room tables of old women who arranged the tiny figures of skaters, figures made out of lead and handpainted in their childhood.

These arrangements were fussed over for hours every December by the old women who were filled with the anticipation of delighted children who would visit during the holidays. The children rarely came and if they did it was with the familiar reluctance of children to visit the old. They came for gifts and candy and took no joy in the intricate display set out on the dining room table, the frozen lake mirror, the skating figures, the mounds of whipped cotton representing snow, the small cardboard houses and pipe-cleaner trees, disproportionate toy cars and perhaps a sled. It was motionless and therefore of no value to a child. Its lack on animation was just another reason to dislike these forced visits. And being children they did nothing to hide their irritation. They were rude and hurtful and when their rudeness and hurtfulness was pointed out to them they would shrug, compounding their sins with indifference.

But really, he thought, they are not so much rude and hurtful and indifferent as they are afraid. They are afraid of people closer to death than they are and they know the older you get the closer you are to the end. They are primitives in this terror; cute little cavemen and cavewomen made hysterical by the approach of someone who, sooner than the person would want, would be as dead and motionless as the lead figures she has arranged on the mirror on her dining room table. They are grimy little monsters, inarticulate, selfish, sociopathic, snatching her candy and toys then skulking by the door waiting for the grown-ups who forced them to come here to finish their stupid tribute to this old and therefore useless creature, so they can leave, so they can finally just go and take them away from this lavender scented house of death with its drawn curtains and dark corners and no television to look at, just pictures of people all ready dead and therefore of no use to anyone.

Perhaps it is because children have so recently become aware of being alive that they fear death more than the rest of us.

Their irritating complaints will eventually erode the will of the grown-ups who brought them and they will all leave. And the old woman will be left in the quiet house which has seen so many withdrawals, more and more as the time goes, and at a disturbingly accelerating rate now. She loves the children and the life they represent and is sorry they can’t see her as anything but the source of boredom and sugar. But she also recognizes their cruelty and monstrous nature. They are ugly little proto-people without grace or wisdom. They should be moved through this childhood period as rapidly as possible so that they can become something of value. Until such time they should be instructed to shut-up and informed that they are really very stupid little creatures whose opinion is not sought or appreciated.

This, of course, is not the prevailing opinion in the nation where Mr. Barbicane resided. In fact, for some reason, the prevailing opinion is the exact reverse of what commonsense would dictate. In Mr. Barbicane’s world, there is an assumption that these little monsters should be serviced continually and that their strident whims should become the basis for the entire culture. Another reason why Mr. Barbicane so liked to detach himself from the planet now hidden by clouds.

It was at this point the pilot came on the public address system and welcomed the passengers. Prior to this announcement, the pilot always remains mute, buffered from his charges by the co-pilot, cabin attendants and ground-based crew. But once in the air, once in his true and unchallenged domain, the pilot spoke to Mr. Barbicane and the others with a firm if disinterested male voice that spoke to altitude and weather conditions and the estimated time of their arrival and what they might expect to find there. He completed his speech by acknowledging the fact that the people in the passenger cabin had a choice in air carriers and expressing his gratitude as well as the gratitude of the airline itself that they had made the series of choices leading to their trusting their lives to this organization and this crew of highly trained professionals in particular. If there was anything a passenger thought they needed to make their journey more comfortable, that person should not hesitate to communicate those needs to a cabin attendant.

All was preceding well. Mr. Barbicane grew increasingly confident in his status as passenger. The airport had been negotiated, there had been no problems with his ticket, not mechanical problems with the plane or meteorological difficulties along the projected route, nothing to send him back into the nightmare of re-booking and re-scheduling. The take-off had been perfect, the climb and leveling, all perfection.

Now began the core of the flight, the patient waiting in a comfortable seated position while the machine around him transported Mr. Barbicane through the lower atmosphere surrounded as he was by travelers of all sorts and missions.

The only problem…no, problem was much too serious a label. The only point of concern…and even that was too strong a word. The only tick Mr. Barbicane was willing to admit to was the, he was sure, transitory inability to bring into focus his fellow travelers; the problem…alright, call it a problem…of not being able to distinguish them, to see them properly and keep them focused in his mind as individuals.

He decided to use the next few minutes of the flight to experiment. He would look at the woman seated next to him. He usually avoided doing this, kept his eyes directed out the window or down at his tray of food or the pages of a book or, on long flights when the cabin was darkened and video entertainment provided, looking over the seatback in front of him to the screen at the front of the cabin, watching the various programs. He never listened to these show, he only watched. He much preferred the powerful white noise of the cabin pressure and the vibration of the engines to the soundtrack of the various presentations. He would watch the tiny actors as if they were performers in a cunningly detailed puppet theatre. The motives of the miniature figures were not as interesting as the casual ballet of their actions.

But there would be no film entertainment on this flight due to its comparatively short duration. Besides, he had made the decision to see if he could differentiate the person sitting next to him.

Mr. Barbicane looked down at his feet then started to turn his head to the left, very slowly, a few degrees at a time until some part of the passenger at his side came into his field of vision. This happened and he almost gasped when he realized what he was looking at.

What he saw, extended under the seat was a bare female leg. Next to it a second leg. The feet were almost bare, wearing flat sandals consisting of little more than a sole and two narrow straps the reached back over each foot from between the great and second toe. The nails were painted a dark grape color. The skin was not tanned, but not pale. The legs were trim, neither flaccid nor grotesquely muscled. These were the legs of a young woman wearing a pair of pale yellow shorts. Not running shorts, but the sort hikers wear, very short, but with a cuff and multiple pockets and loops. She also wore a fanny-pack sort of pouch. Mr. Barbicane turned his head a little more, still looking down and saw that above the waist of the shorts was the beginning of a ribbed t-shirt of a thin oatmeal colored fabric. He could now see the young woman’s bare arm now and the rise of her breasts above the scoop of the t-shirt.

After the sudden and inexplicable shock of first seeing that bare leg, Mr. Barbicane was relieved that he was able to maintain the various body parts in a proper continuity; that the legs were where legs should be and the shoulders lead to arms and the arms lead to hands holding a thick magazine filled with pictures of heavily made up women with expressions suggesting a vapid confusion and apparent unawareness of their location or how they came to be there. He wanted to look at her profile, at her face, to make sure everything was all right there, that there hadn’t been some distressing cubistic rearrangement. But he really couldn’t do that, he really couldn’t just turn and look at her, without the very real risk of her looking back. There was the very real danger of eye contact, problematic all by itself, but happening this early in the flight there was the possibility of Mr. Barbicane being completely undone. He would wait to try to look at her face. Perhaps during drink service, while the cabin attendants were in the aisles. He could look then, see at least the side of her head and take it from there.

That determined, Mr. Barbicane was struck with the realization of just how much of the young lady’s body was available for him to look at. Between the legs and the bare arms and the cut of the shirt, the vast majority of her surface was on display. This amazed him. Not that he was a prude. He was amazed at the mind set that would permit someone to go out in such a state.

Imagine. Being not only not repulsed by the sight of your own body, but being able to expose so much of it to the world. What must that be like? What would you feel in the morning, looking in the mirror? Would you identify with the person looking back at you? What about in the shower? What would a shower be like if you looked like the woman in the seat next to him? A shower was something utilitarian, a period of unavoidable nakedness and self-awareness that needed to be kept to as short a time as practical. But if you looked like that and you were aware that you looked like that and could actually derive some aesthetic pleasure out of how your body looked and, he reasoned, felt…what would that do to the concept of taking a shower? Suddenly a shower takes on an aspect of ritual, one filled with gratitude.

How conscious was the choice to leave her house, to step out into the world wearing shorts and a t-shirt? Certainly there was comfort. There was probably at least some pride. Satisfaction? Entitlement? Were the choices of clothing made based on who she was leaving or based on who she would find at the other end of the trip? Was it about the person taking you to the airport, or the person waiting to pick you up at the other airport? Was this the promise made during the shower? I will go out into the world as myself and let the world enjoy what I have enjoyed in my own home, in my own mirror. I exist and you can see that I exist and isn’t that the most pleasant thing to contemplate for both of us?

Or was their no consciousness at all. Perhaps it never occurred to her that any real decision needed to be made, at least any decision beyond comfort. It didn’t matter to her. She stepped out into the world without concern for the opinion or judgment of others. They had no power to judge her with look or word.

Mr. Barbicane felt old beyond his years. He felt dusted with his own dead skin. If he moved, parts of him would flake away to be pulled into the air circulating system to be filtered and reintroduced to the cabin environment where, perhaps, in one breath, traces of him would be pulled into the lungs of the woman at his side. A ghostly remnant of him might be transported by a sigh, deep into the body next to him, there to cling to the side of an alveoli until dislodged again and coughed out, expulsed. The essence of Mr. Barbicane finally coming to rest in a ball of pink tissue for disposal later.

He was lifted from this contemplation by a cabin attendant leaning over him and asking what, if any, beverage he would like.

Chapter Five

With his eyes shut, Mr. Barbicane listened to the airplane fill with people. Normally he would take advantage of this seat so forward in the aircraft to watch the peristaltic progress of his fellow travelers. But his experience in the departure area, the inability to see people as individuals, plucked at his mind. He was not so much afraid to look as he thought it wiser not to look. If he opened his eyes and found he could not tell one person from another, if he couldn’t get the right head with the right body, he would surly find it distressing. And if he did, there was nothing he could do about it. If he said something…well, what could he possibly say? How could he possibly explain what was happening? Not that anything was happening. He was just having a little trouble being able to tell people apart. What would he get out of informing the cabin attendant of his perceptual difficulty? She might think he was ill and they would have to take him of the plane, they would prevent him from leaving and that’s the last thing he wanted.

So he stayed quietly in his seat listening to the people pass by, feeling the change of shadow across him as they blocked and cleared the windows on the other side of the cabin.

There was nothing wrong. Whatever it was…and it wasn’t anything, really…was something along the lines of that ghost slash across his vision, the one the back of his eye picked up through the gap between the steps and the airplane. An optical illusion.

After all, he’d been able to see the faces of the woman at the ticket counter and the woman who checked his boarding pass, and the cabin attendant who’d greeted him when he stepped on board. They were focused, their features were properly placed on their faces, their heads firmly attached to their bodies. He had no problem there. It was his fellow passengers he was having trouble with.

He felt someone slip into the aisle seat next to him. He heard the person exhale as they leaned forward to put something under the seat in front of them and knew from the quality of the sigh that he was now seated next to a woman. He kept his eyes closed.

Mr. Barbicane had crossed the nation several times without exchanging a single word with the person sitting next to him. He respected their privacy and expected a reciprocal indifference.

After several minutes the sounds coming from the people snaking their way to the back of the aircraft diminished and a cabin attendant came on the public address system reminding all within the sound of her voice about the federal regulations requiring everyone to be in their seat before the plane could be pushed back into the taxiway. She then requested that everyone on board direct their attention to the front of the cabin.

Mr. Barbicane did as he was told, opening his eyes and looking straight ahead to watch one of the cabin attendants act out the instructions heard over the small speaker above his head. He watched her hold up a card on which all exits from the MD-87 were clearly marked and that a path to these exits would be delineated by a light strip imbedded in the cabin floor. He was shown how to operate a seat-belt and what to do with the yellow oxygen mask which would drop down from a panel in the unlikely event of a loss of cabin pressure.

He kept his eyes on the woman demonstrating the safety measures. He felt she deserved at least that much. All around him were the sounds of people settling in their seats, finishing cell phone conversations, preparing paperwork or reading material, blasé in their disregard for this important information. Perhaps someday those people will pay a heavy price for their inattention. Perhaps that day was upon them. Were they hours, perhaps minutes away from cursing themselves for not listening as they struggled with their seatbelts, the Pacific canting wildly to one side beyond the window as they desperately tried to remember if their lifejacket was in a packet in the seatback in front of them or if their seat cushion itself was to be used as a floatation device? Disrespectful fools. They were the authors of their own fate as far as Mr. Barbicane was concerned, and would receive no sympathy from him. For he alone among them would know that even though oxygen was flowing into the mask, the plastic bag would not inflate.

The announcement was completed with the promise of beverage service once the aircraft had reached its cruising altitude of thirty-five thousand feet. Soft drinks, water, and juice were free while there was a nominal charge for wine and beer. Exact change was always appreciated. In first class, Mr. Barbicane knew whatever beverage he chose would be free, regardless of its alcoholic content.

There was a slight jerk, a shudder through the length of the machine as the tractor attached to the nose gear backed the aircraft away from the terminal building and into the taxiway. A pause while the tractor was detached then the throttles of both engines were gently advanced and the turbines behind him surged slightly in order to overcome the inertial bulk of all those people and bags and fuel and metal and the aircraft moved forward under its own power for the first time since Mr. Barbicane stepped on board.

Clear of the terminal, the aircraft started rolling along the parking lot perimeter to the end of the longer of the airport’s two runways, 15/33, which runs essentially north and south and has a length of six thousand eight hundred and eighty-six feet and a width of one hundred and fifty feet. It has a surface of grooved concrete and, when used in the 15 configuration, i.e. taking-off to the south, the heading is 152 magnetic, 167 true.

The aircraft lumbered along the taxi way, its wingtip almost even with the chain link fence that guarded the budget parking lot where Mr. Barbicane parked his car before boarding the shuttle to the terminal. He saw the Number Eight shuttle stop he used and then, to his amazement, he saw his car. It was a starling coincidence and he almost waved to his car as he passed. He wondered if this sighting had any meaning. Certainly it wasn’t a bad thing to see one’s car before departing. Therefore he decided to take it as an exceptionally good omen.

The airplane reached the end of the taxiway and made a slow arc of a turn to bring it around to the foot of the runway. They reached that point, apparently already cleared for departure, because once the pilot had the nose of the aircraft centered on the runway, the throttles were fully applied and the machine charged down the concrete, picking up speed and pressing Mr. Barbicane gently back against his seat.

The parking lot streaked by on the wrong side of the plane for him to even attempt to pick out his car. Then the terminal went by. Then the nose of the plane started to lift.

Mr. Barbicane did not feel the exact moment the main gear lost touch with the runway. He never did and this surprised him. He couldn’t understand why such a profound event wasn’t accompanied by an appropriate acknowledgement. A sound, a light, perhaps a visible tentacle of gravity snapping clear of the undercarriage as the aircraft escaped. But there was no such delineation and he had to guess at the moment, never guessing right, always off by a few seconds, only knowing for sure as the landscape all around dropped below the plane as it climbed and started to bank which is what the aircraft did now.

Mr. Barbicane was no longer in physical contact with the planet Earth. He had been removed from the surface and all that was left behind was circumstantial evidence of his existence; his car, his home, his other worldly goods. You might deduce their owner from the fact of their existence, but you couldn’t really make the leap to saying for sure there really was an owner. You couldn’t, without fear of contradiction, state unequivocally that there really was someone named Mr. Barbicane and this was his hat and these are the checks he wrote and this is what was left of the bottle of mouthwash he put in the medicine cabinet next to the razor he used yesterday. You might locate people who claim to have seen him. Possibly saw him in the market, purchasing the mouthwash and razor you found in the medicine cabinet. And those people might believe they had seen him…not that anyone ever took note of him in the market or anywhere else for that matter. There were dribs and drabs and the vague suggestion of a rumor that a Mr. Barbicane walked the Earth. But in that moment, as he was in the process of being subsumed into the firmament, the Mr. Barbicane in question did not walk among mortal men. And you really couldn’t prove it.

In this sense, Mr. Barbicane, when aloft, was very much like God.

Chapter Four

On the other side of the door he found the air thick with the fumes of jet exhaust, a singularly exciting scent. Concrete spread out in all directions to the horizon. Ahead of him, above him, waiting, was a silver Boeing MD-87 built in 1994 at the Boeing plant in Long Beach, California.

The overall length of an MD-87 is one hundred and thirty feet four inches, with a wing-span of one hundred and seven feet eight inches, and a height at its tail of twenty-nine feet six inches. It’s maximum take-off weight, which in the configuration Mr. Barbicane was about to board consisted of the weight of the airframe itself added to the weight of one hundred and thirty passengers, nine hundred and thirty-seven cubic feet of cargo and seven thousand U.S. gallons of JP-4 jet fuel, plus its two Pratt and Whitney JT8D-217C engines (which can generate a total maximum thrust of twenty thousand pounds), was one hundred and forty-nine thousand pounds, or seventy-four and a half tons. The MD-87 is capable of attaining speeds of up to five hundred and four miles per hour, which is just over three quarters of the speed of sound, with an effective range of four thousand three hundred and ninety-five nautical miles. Boeing terminated production of the MD series in December, 1999.

It seemed to Mr. Barbicane that there was nothing so beautiful, so emblemic of all that is good in modern man as the sight of this metal skinned machine that seemed to loom over him like the frozen form of some ancient beast on display in a museum. The closer he went, the more his perspective was distorted, the larger the nose of the plane became, the longer its body, the more distant it towering tail.

Soon he would be within the beast, a part of it. Soon he would lose all control over his life, surrendering it to this construct of metal and plastic. He would be taken in and once inside he would not only be forbidden by federal law to interfere with the operation of the aircraft in any way, he would be intellectually prohibited from doing so.

Often he looked to the left when he stepped onto a commercial aircraft, hoping the door to the cockpit would be often. In there he glimpsed a room crowded with information and controls, their purpose and intelligence beyond Mr. Barbicane’s understanding. His ignorance of these items made him giddy. And carved out of the wall of controls, a horizontal window looking out over the abbreviated nose of the aircraft. Looking straight ahead, a direction no passenger was permitted to share; all Mr. Barbicane and the others were permitted was a sideways vantage point. They could look off to either side, but could not see forward, they could not see ahead of them. They could not see where they were going. It would be too much for average mortals. On board he would be useless. He would be without purpose. He would be…the word rose in his chest on a bubble of expectation…a passenger.

He climbed the steps to the forward cabin door. For a moment he was level with the swept wing to his right. He glanced over, at the rounded edge of metal, at the circular dots of the counter sunk rivets holding the wing together, holding it to the fuselage. He saw apertures and divots, tiny pieces of metal thrust up from the skin, small spaces marked with codes and everywhere tiny yellow warning stickers, the simple, oft repeated, non-negotiable shibboleth: NO STEP.

At the top of the stairs, while the line of people ahead of him was temporarily stalled by some congestion inside the aircraft, he looked around, looked back. He looked at the cracks in the tarmac below. He looked at the seal around the cabin door. He was going on a trip. He would be leaving soon. He would be unavailable, in transit, on his way. He would be neither here nor there.

There was unseen resolution in the cabin ahead of him and the march of people resumed. A moment and Mr. Barbicane stepped into the aircraft, stepped over a narrow crack, a gap between the edge of the top of the rolling stairs and the threshold of the cabin door. Through this gap morning sun bounced up from the pavement and burned a brief slash across the inside of his eyes, a slash that remained like a ghost on his vision for several seconds once he had crossed over to enter the machine.

There was a woman there in a blue-gray uniform with hair the color of a raven’s wing. She had olive skin and smiled at Mr. Barbicane and asked if he knew where he was going. The context of this question was restricted to his placement in the aircraft and not what is referred to as his final destination. He told her he did know where he was going and started down the long tube of regimented seats.

He did not march far, because Mr. Barbicane, thanks to the timely use of frequent flyer miles, was traveling in the first class cabin. He located his window seat, placed his bag in the overhead compartment and dropped into his seat, immediately fastening and tightening his seat belt.

The plastic outer covering of his window was etched with a hundred thousand miles of scratches, the result of sub-sonic sand and dust shrieking along the side of the aircraft. With the sun at its current angle, each crack dragged a razor thin rainbow across his vision.

Mr. Barbicane made sure his seat was in its full upright position then placed his hands on the two arm rests and sighed. He closed his eyes and waited to be transformed.

Chapter Three

A lesser man might have been crippled by this experience. He might turn away, frightened or chastised or bitter, swearing never again to put himself in a position where fate might again play with him so cruelly. But Mr. Barbicane did not declare such a repudiation. The experience had tempered his passion, but did not diminished it. It certainly served to increase his gratitude and his understanding of what a blessing the true status of passenger was. It helped him monitor his emotions as he went through the process, kept him from peaking too early.

The most negative thing was that gap, that space before boarding in which there was nothing to do but wait to see if the starts would align, as they did with much more regularity than not, and permit him the change he sought, the transformation that renewed his heart and lightened his load through life.

It was important to remain calm, to step back, to focus on level breathing, to avoid looking at clocks, to go to a calm, inner place, there to await the moment when an amplified voice, usually female, summoned him to the door, summoned him not by name, but by a range of row numbers; announcing that he was going to be permitted to proceed.

This is what Mr. Barbicane did as he waited. He also filled the minutes by thinking about the journey that was ahead of him. The trip would take him through an airport he knew to an airport he did not. Yes, it was to be a connecting flight.

While many travelers dislike the idea of connecting flights, the concept of multiple take-offs and landings, of boarding, de-boarding, moving through another airport and repeating the check-in and boarding process, Mr. Barbicane did not. To him, a connecting flight was an opportunity for added passenger experience. Sometimes he thought about the time spent at an intermediate airport between connecting flights might be the best, the purest, most transcendental part of being a passenger.

It certainly was the ultimate in suspension; to be somewhere that had nothing to do with where you were going except as a place to be passed through. It wasn’t as if you were even visiting a different city because you never really got to see the city. You were at the airport. You were outside of the city the airport serviced. You were in that wonderfully sealed, ever familiar geography of Airportia. What bliss.

We would land and take-off from the Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport, the second largest in the nation, which was actually spread over more than eighteen thousand acres of the cities of Euless, Grapevine, Irving and Coppell, Texas. DFW, as it is officially abbreviated, consists of five north-south parallel runways and two diagonal runways, four terminals with a total of one hundred and thirty-seven aircraft boarding gates. It was a beautiful complex of moving sidewalks, swift trams, and an endless selection of hand-held food and drink. He would be one of more than fifty-nine million people who would pass through the place, taking up momentary citizenship in one of the capsulated fiefdoms that make up the nation of Airportia. One of fifty-nine million transitioning through this airport alone. The number made with woozy with comfortable anonymity.

He would spend a scheduled hour and forty minutes at DFW, changing planes, which could mean walking a few yards between two adjacent gates, or perhaps having to take a tram from one end of the busy metropolis to the other. Then he would be pulled into the sky again, on his way to a place he’d never been. A place the very name of which called to him now: Pittsburgh. He had never been to Pittsburgh. He had heard remarkable things about the airport there and had great hopes for the place.

Activity was increasing at the ticket counter guarding the door that lead to the tarmac; more people checking in, confirming their seats, preparing to depart.

One might assume Mr. Barbicane was a great observer of his fellow travelers. One would be wrong. Frankly, they were of no interest to him and for the most part he offered them the temporary social invisibility he wanted for himself. They were a blur to him, an essentially uniform collection of interchangeable types as generic as the people you see clustered around the drawings of buildings in architectural renderings, figures added to give the building perspective and indicate it was inhabitable and welcoming to the general population.

Now a dozen of them were strung out in a line at the counter. Men, women, children, all different and yet all the same in their need or desire to leave this place and go somewhere else. He looked at them, trying to bring them into focus, but found this difficult. He could see the space in vivid detail; the corners of the counter, the red of the lights articulating the flight number and status, the perpendiculars of tense-bar stanchions keeping his fellow travelers in line, but he couldn’t coordinate any information about the people. They were broken up into mosaic details; bags, hats, shoes, hands with ticket folders, hands with wallets, empty hands, the sides of heads, ears, bellies, cylindrical body shapes, bodies with the silhouettes of gently turned piano legs. But he was having trouble coordinating the details of any one person. He couldn’t keep this head with the appropriate shoulders, above the supporting torso, atop the associated legs. Trying to bring their faces into clarity was even more difficult. The faces broke down as well, into noses and eyes and lips, like the elements of children’s book where you flip through the possibilities trying to produce the funniest and most grotesque combination.

He looked away.

There was a cart by the door that led to the tarmac. When he checked in at the counter the girl in the crisp blue uniform told him that it was an experiment in service on shorter flights. As passengers passed through the door, they were to select an insulated paper bag from the cart which was refrigerated. Each bag contained a sandwich, a cheese and cracker snack, an apple, a chocolate chip cookie and a napkin. In flight service would consist of beverages only. The girl then informed Mr. Barbicane that he could take a bag if he wanted to, but since he would be sitting in one of the small aircraft’s first class seats, a full meal would be provided.

He decided that when the moment came, he would take a bag lunch for himself. He could keep it and it could serve as his dinner or late night snack when he arrived in Pittsburgh. He liked the self-contained convenience of the thing. That and the fact that it was free.

The time for boarding would soon be upon him. He stood up, took hold of his bag and made one last visit to the men’s room before returning to the departure area to stand near the door and await the announcement that it was time to board the aircraft.

The girl who had rechecked him for the flight and informed him of the bag lunch service picked up the handset of a phone hidden under the lip of the counter, punched in a code to give her access to the immediate area’s public address system and told the waiting people the flight was ready for them. She then explained how the passengers would be segregated to better facilitate boarding. Older people, people traveling with small children and people who for unstated reasons felt they needed extra time to find their seats were encouraged to board the plane at this time. Then first class passengers and passengers with an elevated status due to the amount of travel they did on this particular airline would be invited to step outside. Mr. Barbicane was part of this group. Others would be permitted access to the plane based on their seat location.

There were only a handful of people who fit the specifications of the first group so it was all of perhaps two minutes before the group containing Mr. Barbicane was invited to step forward.

He did so, boarding pass in hand, the space between his status as unremarkable person and passenger was now measurable in feet. Another pretty girl examined his boarding pass and returned it with the wish that he should have an enjoyable and rewarding journey. He thanked her, took a bag lunch from the cart near the door, then stepped out into the morning sun blasting the tarmac.

Chapter Two

This particular trip began well in that it began at the Burbank Airport which he much preferred to the larger Los Angeles International Airport. Certainly the Burbank Airport was closer to his home and allowed him to leave much later and park at a much more reasonable rate closer to the airport, but central to the pleasure of flying out of Burbank is that it was one of the few remaining facilities that, because of its history of more than seventy-five years of service, it was built at ground level. This meant that passengers had to walk outside of the terminal, cross the tarmac and actually climb a set of stairs to reach the cabin door of their aircraft.

This ritual of leaving a building to enter a plane is something most associate with those distant days before the “jet-way,” the flexible hallway that snakes from the departure area to the open hatch so that you begin your flight by walking through a fluorescent chute that feeds you toward the plane like animals on their way to market. A herd of travelers.

But at Burbank, you walk out into the weather, and climb the stairs like countless diplomats and movie stars in countless news photographs. You move with The Beatles and Marilyn Monroe. Reaching the top of the stairs there is the often irresistible urge to turn and wave once more for the cameras, or at least the coveralled workers on the baggage tractors.

This ghost of air travel past pleased Mr. Barbicane. It was a small symbol, but a potent one and meant that the trip would be well begun.

He had arrived early…he always arrived early…made his way from ticket counter to security to men’s room to newspaper stand to departure area where he checked in again, showing his boarding pass to the ticket agent who smiled and agreed with him that he was all set, then he sat in one of several chairs bolted together and secured to the floor near the door that would open to the tarmac and the aircraft beyond. He sat with his one practically packed and dimensionally acceptable carry-on bag and waited. Waited for that moment of transition when he would officially become a passenger.

These moments before the transformation left him feeling vulnerable and somewhat anxious. Arguably he was already a passenger. He had made a reservation, paid for his ticket, passed through the security check point which was clearly labeled at the point beyond which only PASSENGERS WITH BOARDING PASSES were permitted to go. Yet there was always the possibility that something might deny him that final transcedency of status. There might be mechanical difficulties or scheduling problems that could result in the cancellation of the flight.

The thought of this stoked his anxiety. He was reminded of a grim night begun at this very airport a few years earlier. He had arrived on time and gone through the process of search and inspection. But he was still merely a customer and not a passenger. To become a true passenger, one must slip the surly bonds of earth and escape into the sky, sever all ties with a terrestrial identity and move into the clouds like a watchful angel.

On the night in question he was denied that ascendancy. His short flight from Burbank to San Francisco was at first delayed because of weather and “traffic.” This was common with San Francisco so there was no initial concern. But as the evening and the waiting stretched on he became increasingly skeptical of his ability to leave. This churned his mind in a most distressful fashion. The degree of that distress was in itself distressful and served to increase his apprehension. Apprehension had spilled over into something like desperation when the announcement finally came that the flight had been canceled.

The airline regretted this unfortunate event. Their representative, a young woman named Connie, acknowledged the inconvenience this might create among the waiting people and, on behalf of her employer, took full responsibility for the situation. In an effort to make amends, passengers would be rebooked and complimentary travel vouchers supplied. But they weren’t passengers. And now they would not be passengers.

He took the voucher and new boarding pass for a flight the next day from the lovely hand of young Connie, a woman of perhaps twenty-eight years. He watched her peach colored lips form the words of apology but heard nothing of what she said. She could not be heard over the turmoil of his mind.

So close to that elevated station, that condition of motion, he was now turned away at the very gates of Valhalla, cast out of the terminal into the thick Burbank heat, forced back into that earthly status he had dearly hoped to escape.

What followed was one of the most miserable nights of his existence as he had to reverse the order of the steps that had brought him to the brink of happiness. The shuttle bus to the long term parking lot, the walk from the bus to the car, then the exit from the lot which included the challenging look from the lot attendant when the parking ticket was processed and the shameful truth that his “long term” parking had lasted less than three hours appeared accusingly on the screen. Then home to a house that had gotten on without him, that had been programmed to exist in his absence and now was forced to receive him, take him back. He felt like an invader. Like a housebreaker. Some fetishistic interloper who went into other people’s homes, used their toothbrushes, slept in their beds, pretended to belong.

He thought the night would never end. At the first light of dawn he left the house, shrinking away from his now accusatory windows, to return to the airport hours before his rescheduled flight. But the rituals that so calmed him the day before only served to agitate him; he knew that no matter how deeply into the process of benediction he managed to get, it could all be taken away from him.

He had done nothing to deserve the previous expulsion and there was nothing he could have done to prevent it. While powerlessness was one of the things he strived for by becoming a passenger, this inability to achieve passenger-ness through no fault of his own left him shaken, as if he’d never considered how arbitrary life could be.

The repeated gestures of that morning did nothing to calm him. His mouth was filled with a tense, acrid, bile sort of taste as he waited to board. And when the plane finally pushed back, finally lumbered onto the taxi way, finally reached the end of the runway, finally charged forward, angled up and left the earth, he unlashed his seatbelt the moment the captain gave him permission and rushed to the phone booth sized bathroom and threw-up into the brushed metal of the toilet, squeezed by terrible crushing waves of nausea that produced little more than viscous strings of yellow mucus that were pulled into the belly of the aircraft by a swirl of blue liquid.

The ghost of that experience never left him. It arrived like the distant warning of an impending headache during that suddenly stressful period between checking in and boarding. It was the reminder that the gift of flight could be revoked without courtesy or explanation. The realization that his desire to leave was not a strong enough force in itself to achieve escape. There were forces at work. Forces that cared nothing for his needs or worthiness.

Chapter One

Mr. Barbicane liked travel. Not going places, but traveling; being in motion, being between this place and another place. Suspended. Occupied with the tasks of travel.

He liked packing. Buying small “travel” size items in the drugstore. Arranging to stop the mail and the newspapers. Adjusting timers on lights in different rooms of his house so that it would appear not only that the house was occupied, but that the occupant had an elaborate schedule of moving from one room to another, turning on some lights, turning other lights off. Making sure that the last light left burning was the one in his bedroom in order to give the impression to anyone watching the house that the owner had retired for the evening and was, perhaps, reading in bed for a while before going to sleep. He set the timer for that light to go off at one a.m. The things most people hate about travel were the things that gave him the most pleasure.

He liked airports. The civic motion of the places, the need to have certain documents in order to be able to proceed from point A to point B. He liked pulling a suitcase along endless terminal corridors, past repetitions of the same franchise food and drink storefronts; like a stretch of hermetically sealed completely artificial main street. Others recoiled from this processed experience, from this pretend life. He did not. He took comfort in it. It made no demands of him.

He liked airplanes. He was in childlike awe of the technology. He had limitless respect for the people who were able to maintain and control these remarkable machines. He enjoyed the consistent service of cabin attendants and strove to make their job as easy as he could. Others complained about the quality of food and drink while flying, but he did not. He simply marveled at the very concept of sitting in a relatively comfortable chair and eating hot food while hurtling through the sky, suspended by the Bernoulli Principal; a scientific given he didn’t understand and couldn’t articulate, but believed in completely. He liked the power of the engines. He liked the beads of moisture occasionally trapped between the double pained porthole glass. He liked the smell of jet fuel and the colorful crowds of parked cars in the parking lots swooped over upon arrival and departure.

He liked hotels. Convenient hotels. Practical places with practical furnishings contained by practical, useful architecture. What others thought bland and predictable, he found comforting and uniform. He liked the generically welcoming lobbies, especially the ones with fountains. He like the orderly transaction of checking in and going to the elevators. He liked walking down hotel corridors, anonymous spaces decorated to feel like someone’s home, but never looking like any home anyone’s ever seen. He liked the large mirrors that always face the elevators on the individual floors. He liked the groaning complaint of the ice machine locked in its lonely room at the end of each corridor.

He liked hotel rooms. Simple, logical boxes containing anything a traveler might want or need during his brief stay. He liked the many telephones, more than a single person might need, but all at your disposal. He liked the glowing digits of the clock radios. He liked the faux-headboards always bolted to the wall and not the bed frame. He liked the televisions that were usually hidden in amoires above the mini-bars. He did not like mini-bars, but found their existence in no way reduced his pleasure of the overall hotel room experience. He liked the sealed windows, especially when they overlooked parking lots, and the controls of the heating and air conditioning systems either mounted to the wall, or hidden behind a small metal door in a unit built under the window. He liked card keys, rectangles of plastic you slide into a slot above the door handle which resulted in a small prick of green light to let you know you were expected and would be welcomed by the empty room beyond the door.

He liked renting a car. The idea of a large corporation finding you substantially trustworthy and able that they would entrust several thousand dollars of their machinery to your care in a world full of collision and catastrophe. He liked the plastic key-fob with the company’s logo and car’s information all there, dangling below the ignition as you drove unfamiliar roads and listened to unfamiliar radio voices. He enjoyed discovering the tricks and secrets of different dashboards. What combination of taps and slides worked the windows and vents. He like the different mechanical tapping sounds different turn signal indicators make. Always sounding mechanical and not electronic. As if there was a real clockwork device of some sort creating the noise by physically tapping two pieces of metal or plastic together. All around you in the cockpit of the modern automobile there are tones and beeps and sighs and voices, there are glowing screens crawling with information, numbers flickering up and down as you increase speed or change CDs. But the turn signal indicator noise always sounds organic amid all these synthetic warnings and confirmations. A click. Like the small metal cricket toys he remembered as a child.

Two pieces of metal, forged together, one painted like a cricket or a frog, the other stiff and flat. You pushed the undecorated piece until it snapped, the hollow of the other piece amplifying the sound. Click. Then you release the metal and it snaps back to its original position. Clack. Was it really something you could consider a toy? It was certainly a noise maker, but was it a toy? What was supposed to be so amusing about the manufacture of this one, rather this pair of sounds?

And why had the automobile industry decided that everything else about the driving experience should be dragged into the future, but this one element, this one sound would never change? Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Then, upon completion of the turn and the righting of the wheel, that other thunk of the turn signal clunking back to its neutral position. This they decided to hold on to. He was glad they had, but he still wondered why. And he wondered how the sound itself was produced. By what agency or device, tucked in among the diodes and displays.

Destination was of no concern. Neither was the purpose of the trip. The solace, the relief, the pleasure came from being in that flux state, that not there, not here, but somewhere between the two. Motion lifted his spirits. It made him feel safe, untouchable. He was no more or less important than the traveler in front of him on the line to remove their shoes or the traveler behind him, the one complaining about the additional security.

He liked the additional security. He liked the double checking of documents, the additional searches, the additional questions, the need to prepare himself for the metal detector and the random attention of the bored looking security personnel. What was irritation to others, was another chance to cope for him.

He liked putting his change and wallet and wrist watch and sometimes his belt in the small tray and sending it through the x-ray machine. He liked even more the retrieval of those personal items on the other side of the metal detectors. He stood at the end of the conveyor, reclaimed his possessions, each one now a prize to be savored; the watch back on the wrist, the wallet back in the pocket, the change and keys in another pocket. With the reinstatement of each item his satisfaction would grow.

Travel made demands, immediate demands that had to be dealt with. Challenges to respond to and rise above, filling his life with a multitude of tiny victories which must eventually add up to a triumph. The nature of that triumph had not been revealed to him. All he knew was that each petty task accomplished brought him nearer a summit tantalizingly obscured by boiling clouds.

And in the meantime, there was the accomplishment of travel. A real accomplishment measurable by boarding passes announcing the miles transversed and hotel bill print outs detailing each meal and phone call, each night. Life made tangible.

In that bubble of movement he felt more alive than when he was still and surrounded by his possessions. In the wave that was travel there was nothing to prove. It was all about movement, about the lateral gravity that pulls you from place to place. In this transitional condition, he felt he was free of the responsibility to control his life, and he could see the physical manifestations of that liberating surrender all around him. It was peaceful. He was not a failure. He became buoyant, drifting above the process. Patient, practical, compliant, cooperative, good-natured, he did nothing to impede the travel of others or the important work of those who facilitated his movements. No one could say a bad word about him. No one would even remember he had been among them.