Drowsy…
I wake in pieces. My body returns before my mind consents. The drone of the plane inside, remembered already. I turn my head and see you. Not a surprise. Recognition. Not a beginning. No origin. Trace the source. Have we have always been seated together in this narrow row? Suspended. Moving.
I am a good sleeper.
Drowsiness comes first. Agreeable. I sleep in motion. Airplanes are sealed with a fixed destination and decisions deferred. I surface slowly swimming in warm water. I see you. My mind reluctant trails behind. The sound is here. The drone. Remembered.
A gate in Chicago, a boarding call in Spanish, the familiarity of proximity with no consequence. We already shared airspace, but it was quiet.
You look. Not unkind. Not kind. Held too long, as if you are deciding where I am to be included among all the things. Expectant. A fixed attention deciding if a thing is truly alive. It was on the other flight south. I remember your beard.
“Hi. Didn’t we travel on the same flight going to Mexico? I guess I didn’t recognize you when we sat down,” I say.
“I think we did. I am Walter.”, you say.
This pleases me. It says little. All the things are untouched. I am a laboratory specimen introducing myself. This is, on balance, unhelpful. Now I remember. Is it strange we are again on the same flight two weeks apart. That first time was south.
You watch me closely. Am I awaiting confirmation? It will pass.
“Mexico. We’ve flown together before.”
“Same flight. Both directions.”
Instinctively you ration truth.
You are looking. I turn away. The window has light, thin and unfulfilled. Below, the earth not remembered, a badly kept sketch. I always choose the window seat.
We speak again. Not from need or pressure. The silence defies capacity.
“My wife went to Mexico,” I say.
It sounds definitive. This pleases me, my answer. It arranges nothing.
With her mother. The boy too. Taken. And I remain. Work remained. A kindness. I work for charitable people. They understand the back and forth.
There is a way people look when observing, searching for a pattern that can be named. I idly wonder the pattern I am. What order imposed on the unfiled facts of me? I stare for a moment. You stare back with calm, unwavering focus. An agent trained to observe or recently with persuasive training.
We continue speaking. My words uneven. Waiting in different rooms. A friendly rapport. Why do you care about my banking habits? I admit they are diffuse. I am careless.
You smile faintly.
A pause. Is my life a mildly puzzling spreadsheet?
Yes, my wife took off to Mexico with her mother, with my son. I fly back and forth from Chicago to support our family. Family? My wife has not divorced me. I move back and forth. I do it. Crossing. Recrossing. I wish distance was a solution.
You chuckle at that. At what? I didn’t say anything.
Pachuca. A name to hold. Silver. Still taken out. The earth noticed. It leans now. Toward another place it will never arrive. Names have weight. Treasure wrought from the earth until the earth remembered. Now a city that leans toward another city it cannot reach. Football there, the first, they say. Pride is a banner against thin air.
“Pachuca was once silver mining. Now it is a bedroom community for Mexico City professionals keeping families safe within commuting distance. The professionals don’t live in my son’s neighborhood,” I say.
“Pachuca held the first football team in Mexico. A British legacy. Also, from the British are the pastes, but the pastes are a meat pie with flavors colonials never dreamed of. High in the mountains, Pachuca has altitude. Not as high as Real del Monte. Football and poverty and commuters and altitude are Pachuca.”, I continue.
I always stay at La Joya. The Joy? My Spanish is limited to the point of non-existence. The name insists. The hotel staff does as well. They ask me why? There are many cheaper rooms in town, and my cousin is a great cook. Easier lives? I evade. I keep repetitions. They eventually harden at the repeats and leave me alone.
La Joya is not the joy, it is the jewel. Why do you spend so much money at this hotel? It is very affordable for my American budget. One hundred a night is fine… great location, good security, and cabs. The cabs know where it is and are always there to take me somewhere else. Most important is the Internet to work while Daniel is in school. I do much good work on the Internet.
There is always one. Not cause. Measure.
Back to you I say simply “Daniel is my son.”
You shift with noncommittal noise. Do you disagree? You are fatigued by disorder. Return to the numbers. Order. You remind me we have flown before. I agree. It comforts you.
Other rooms. Other voices. Men discussing revolutions as if scheduled. Cameras turning. Faces unprepared. Friendship. Endings without end. Connecting. Not connected.
The plane continues. It does not inquire.
I blink. Not to sleep. To return. To the place where before that now refuses division. The man then and the man now sit together side by side. Recognition. No account.
So drowsy… in the window seat… waking up… going home… always up for chit chat… I enjoy chit chat.
Elena is beautiful. A shining light. A better writer than I will ever be. Her father is a colonel or general or worse in Europe. I will never meet him, but I know he told his daughter good for you. I was not present but appreciated the enthusiasm.
Chicago. Behind a building. Smoking in the back. Cold. The smoke suspended before and after. Elena worked for a high-end company that made the highest of high-end suits for high-end men.
Our heads in the smoke, but she was pragmatic and down to earth. She dressed precisely. I did not. We stood together. I remember her laugh.
Never to trust a Bulgarian. I believed the certainty.
I came back from Mexico once unsteady. The inner ear tilted so my surroundings could not hold still. The aircraft refused its position. I called her on arrival. It felt temporary. She answered as if elsewhere. Then not elsewhere. She was tired, or drunk, or both.
Later she was neither, or perhaps both. She sang. Soft. Then not soft. Fly me to the moon. As if there were another place to go.
We were together then as when meaning has not yet arrived or has already passed. There was a rhythm to it, a repetition, like the plane’s engines now, like the trips back and forth. I remember thinking even then that I was not where I was. Adjacent to myself performing, necessary. I roll her over. Yes and yes and yes. I know she is not fertile.
It is complete.
She holds me tight. Elena wants sex too short and an embrace too long. She held me even longer. Elena wanted words. Meaning. I gave nothing. That was when it ended, though we did not stop then.
She wants to talk about what it means. I don’t know. I am slightly ill. You didn’t want to talk to me when I landed. I am not sure what I wanted…
Never trust me. It had a seriousness that resisted interpretation. I believed her selectively.
You watched my unspoken drowsy reveries. It is difficult to tell when your attention is genuine and when it is procedural.
The plane hummed. The cabin lights dimmed and brightened again. Time contracted.
“Diffuse,” I corrected. “But harmless.”
You considered that.
“And you?”
“Completely,”
Then, after a pause: “Which is why I often prefer to seem otherwise.”
Later, a story remembered. A friend. A needle. A small act. Delicate and deliberate for change. Consequence without spectacle. Months pass. Evidence appears. Among my things. Altered. Dried and useless. I never ask. Every so often knowledge arrives intact. This knowledge arrived complete.
I imagine a child with Elena would be smart and beautiful. I have zero doubts there are trustworthy persons in this world just not the one telling me not to trust her species.
The plane continues. It does not question its direction. I open my eyes again and return to memory and present tense refusing to separate. We sit side by side as strangers who recognize each other but are forbidden to say how.
You looking at me. I feel it as I turn toward the window again. The light hard and thin, the earth far below so badly remembered. There is a way people look when they think they are observing, when in truth they are searching for a pattern they can name, and I wonder what pattern you think I am, what small order you will impose on the loose and not yet filed facts of me.
The silence is now so crowded. Words come out uneven, as if they have been waiting in different rooms.
I stay always in the same place. La Joya. The Joy. The Jewel. The name insists upon itself. Yes the clerks always ask me why I spend what I spend when there are cheaper rooms, beautiful and kind cousins with keys, easier answers. I choose my repetition the way I choose my regret. I have a stubbornness that becomes its own reason.
I decide to change the subject in the only way that ever works for me, which is to overshare.
“I go back and forth,” I continued. “I work remotely. La Joya is the best hotel in Pachuca.”
You nod encouragingly, a man who had just inserted a coin into a machine and was waiting for the story to dispense.
“Good location, Internet and cabs. Mostly Internet.”
You asked little about that, which told me more than if you had pressed. Again, you circle back to patterns, to repetition, the quiet arithmetic of a who is me, flying so often between the same two points. You speak of consolidation and efficiency. Banking again I realize. It would have been comic if not so deliberate.
“I assure you,” I say, “my finances are modest.”
“That’s not the question.”
Drowsy reveries intrude again…
Daniel saw her just once after it was all over. My son asked why she looked at me as if I had done something terrible. I told him I do not think she was not angry. I told him what was easiest. The failure remains. Daniel liked Elena well enough because he loved me more. If looks could kill… Daniel says she looks really mad at you. Not my finest moment.
Fly me to the moon.
Pachuca comes up again, as it always does when people ask about my geography. I repeat myself as usual. It is a city of silver, now a compromise between ambition and distance. Football matters. Poverty matters. I stay at La Joya, “the jewel.”
The desk clerks never believe my reasons for choosing the hotel. They offer cheaper alternatives, cousins with spare rooms, better deals. I decline. I need the illusion of consistency.
My son is there when I am there. In school while I work. I say his name and then I take it back. Names are not safe.
You continue listening but care most about the ledgers that do not balance. I tell you I am careless. I have never been careful. You shift to look at me as if that, at least, can be corrected. Tired of the disorder of my telling, you return to numbers, to accounts, to a hope I cannot fulfill. If only my life could be reconciled when arranged properly on paper.
The conversation drifts, and with it my mind again. Hyde Park, cigarettes in the cold, the peculiar intensity of student politics.
My first week at University. I think almost idly of a meeting once, Trotskyite. Earnest and theatrical. Cameras intruding. Another room, another time. Young men speaking of revolutions as if it were the weather. Cameras turning toward marked faces.
I notice my picture taken multiple times. Sitting there trying to figure it out. Aiden, tall, thin, and charismatic, got the attention. A strange story… pro-Communism, anti-American… but where is the beef? You fly to the USSR freely as an American and your comrades are not so privileged? Why does this guy keep taking my picture?
Aiden. Fiery. Carelessly charismatic as young men can be. Aiden attracted attention. I deflected it. I thought I did. I met Aiden first week at university.
His hair was longer than mine, a lion’s mane above punky clothes with clothespins and whatnot. In contrast I was uncombed hiding behind a black leather jacket. As young white student cigarette smokers in Hyde Park we often got hit up for money or cigarettes or whatever. One of those times I was made to know that I was one thing and Aiden was another. The exact language is no longer acceptable in repetition… times change.
Aiden got much attention in the meeting, as he would everywhere. A beautiful and talented fellow student would make a racy comic fantasy with him as the star. Neither of us followed up with the Trotskyites. So we were on the list, and the why for me was my love for Aiden. One never knows which moments mattered.
Back to you. We established a rapport, as strangers improbably again confined to a pressurized space might do. The not impossible notion that the universe decided we needed to have this speak together for reasons not clear…
We descend toward Chicago. A familiar approach. The lake, the grid, an illusion of order imposed on a thing less structured.
Gravity reasserts itself and we pretend life is soon to become organized again. We land. People stand up immediately, as they always do, despite the complete lack of anywhere to immediately go.
“It was nice talking to you,” you say.
“Of course,” I reply.
That earns the faintest hint of approval. You nod. I suppose this too will be noted.
I watch you leave, still unsure whether I have been questioned, assessed, or merely noticed, or it was just another random conversation.
Now you are gone, absorbed into the slow moving line of persons returning to their lives.
I lean back in my seat once again before gathering my things and close my eyes. The drowsiness engages immediately.
Another file has been updated.
My next trip to Mexico is more memorable. My wife is back to the States soon. She wants me to bring Daniel’s toys back to Chicago. She just had a baby with a second or third string football player. I tell her the baggage weight limit is 50 lbs, so please don’t send me back with more than 50 lb. I know this detail will get a free upgrade, maybe to an exit row with another companion. It is only four or five hours from Mexico City to Chicago when you fly direct and I am always happy to talk.
This is not reassuring.
In my experience, these distinctions collapse with time.
There are always photographs.