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.