Drowsy…
I wake in pieces. My body returns before the mind consents. The drone of the plane inside me, remembered already. I turn my head and see you beside me. Not a surprise. Recognition, without beginning. Not origin. Trace the source. Have we always been seated together in a narrow row? Suspended. Moving.
I am a good sleeper.
Drowsiness always comes first. Agreeable. I can sleep in motion. Airplanes sealed, a tube with a fixed destination with decisions deferred. I surface slowly swimming through warm water. I see you. My mind is reluctant. It trails behind. The sound is here. The drone. Remembered.
A gate in Chicago, a boarding call in Spanish, the familiarity of proximity without consequence. We have shared airspace before, if not conversation.
You look. Not unkind. Not kind. Held too long, as if deciding where I am to be included among all the things. Expectant. That fixed attention deciding if a thing is truly alive. It was on the other flight south when time loosened in a similar air of metal and sleep. I remember your beard.
“Hi. Didn’t we travel on the exact 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 so little. All the things are still untouched. I feel like a laboratory specimen introducing myself. This is, on balance, unhelpful. Now I certainly remember you. Is it strange we are on again on the same flight, not quite two weeks apart. That first time we were going south.
You watch me so closely. Am I just awaiting confirmation? It will pass.
“Mexico. We’ve flown together before.”
“Same route. Both directions.”
No elaboration. Instinctively, you ration truth.
You continue to look. I turn away. The window offers light, thin, insufficient. Below, the earth misremembered, badly kept. A sketch of itself. I always choose the window seat.
We speak. Not from need. From pressure. The silence filled beyond capacity.
“My wife went to Mexico,” I say.
It sounds definitive. This pleases me, my answer. It arranges nothing in particular.
With her mother. The boy too. Taken. I remained. My work remains. A kindness. I work for charitable people. They understand my back and forth movement.
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 will you impose on the loose and still not filed facts of me? I stared stare at you for a moment. You stare back with the calm, unwavering focus of someone who has been trained to observe people or recently had very persuasive training.
We continue speaking. My words are uneven. They were waiting in different rooms. A friendly rapport. Why do you care about my banking habits? I admit they are diffuse. It is carelessness.
You smile faintly.
There followed a pause. Why am I being made aware of my life as 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 my family. Family? My wife has not yet divorced me. I move back and forth. Whatever it is I do it. Crossing. Recrossing. I wish distance was a solution.
You chuckle at that.
Pachuca. A name to hold. Silver. Still taken out. The earth noticed. Now it leans. Toward another place it will never arrive. Names give weight. Treasure wrought from the earth until the earth remembered. Now a city that leans toward another city it cannot quite 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 their family safe within commuting distance. The professionals don’t live in my son’s neighborhood,” I say.
“Pachuca has the first football team in Mexico. The British legacy. Also pastes, a meat pie with flavors colonialists could only dream of. High in the mountains, it has altitude, but it is not as high as Real ded Monte . Football and poverty and altitude are Pachuca.”
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. Many cheaper rooms in town and my cousin is a great cook. Easier lives. I do not answer. I keep my repetitions. They harden. Become reasons.
It is not the joy, it is the jewel. Why do you spend so much money at this hotel so affordable for my American budget? One hundred a night is fine… it is a great location, with security and cabs and wifi to work while Daniel is in school.
There is always one. Not cause. Measure.
Back to you I say simply “Daniel is my son.”
You shift with a small noncommittal noise. Did you disagree? You are fatigued by disorder. Return to numbers. Order. You remind me we have flown before. I agree. It seems to comfort you. It does not comfort me.
Other rooms. Other voices. Men discussing revolutions as if scheduled. Cameras turning. Faces unprepared. Friendships without cause. Endings without end. Connected. Not connected.
The plane continues. It does not inquire.
I blink. Not to sleep. To return. To the place where before and now refuse division. Where the man then and the man now sit together side by side. Recognizing. Failing to account for it.
So drowsy… in the window seat… waking up… going home… always up for chit chat… it doesn’t always work out well but I like chit chat.
Elena is very beautiful. Shining light. A better writer than I will ever be. Her father is a colonel or general or something in Europe. I will never meet him but he tells his daughter good for you. I was not there for the conversation but appreciate the enthusiasm.
Chicago. Behind a building. Smoking in the back. Cold. The smoke suspended between before and after. Elena worked for a high-end company that made the highest of high-end suits for men.
We had heads in the smoke, but she was definitely more pragmatic and back down on 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 quite unsteady. The inner ear tilted so my surroundings would not hold still. The aircraft refused its position. I called her on arrival. It all felt temporary. She answered as if elsewhere. Then not elsewhere. She was tired, or drunk, or both.
Later she was neither, or perhaps both still. She sang. Soft. Then not soft. Fly me to the moon. As if there were somewhere else to go.
We were together then as when meaning has not yet arrived or has already passed. There is a rhythm to it, a repetition, like the plane’s engines now, like the trips back and forth, and I remember thinking even then that I was not where I was. Somewhere adjacent to myself performing, necessary. I roll her over. Yes and yes and yes. I know she is not fertile.
It is complete.
Elena holds me tight. Elena likes sex too short and the 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 someone like me. It had a seriousness that resisted interpretation. I believed her selectively.
You watched my unspoken drowsy reveries, or appeared to. 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.
“Like you?”
“Completely,” I said. Then, after a pause: “Which is why I sometimes prefer to seem otherwise.”
Later, a story. 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 ask nothing. Some knowledge arrives intact. My 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 this one telling me not to trust her particular 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 like strangers who recognize each other and are forbidden to say how.
You looking at me. I can feel it even when I turn toward the window again where the light comes 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 belong to, what small order you hope to impose on the loose and not filed facts of me.
We speak again, not because we must but because the silence is now so crowded. Words come out uneven, as though 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 kind of stubbornness that becomes its own reason.
I decide to change the subject in the only way that ever really works, which is to overshare.
You nod encouragingly, like a man who had just inserted a coin into a machine and was waiting for the story to dispense.
“I go back and forth,” I continued. “I work remotely. Best hotel in Pachuca.”
“Wifi and status. Mostly wifi.”
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, of 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 was not angry. I told him what was easiest. The failure remains. Daniel liked Elena well enough because he liked 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 I try to make sense of my own 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 quite believe my reasons for choosing it. They offer cheaper alternatives, cousins with spare rooms, better deals. I decline. One needs at least 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, because names are never safe once spoken.
You continue listening caring most about the small ledgers of a life that does not balance. I tell you I am not careful. I have never been careful. You shift and 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 recognize. That a life might be reconciled if only it were 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, something Trotskyite. Earnest and more than vaguely theatrical. Cameras intruding. Another room, another time. Young men speaking of revolutions as if it were the weather. Cameras turning toward marked faces.
I definitely noticed my picture taken multiple times. Just sitting there trying to figure it out. Aiden, tall, thin, and charismatic, got more attention. A strange story… pro-Communism, anti-American… where is the beef? Fly to the USSR freely as an American while your comrades are not so privileged? And why does this guy keep taking my picture?
Aiden. Fiery. Charismatic in the careless way of young men who do not yet understand consequence. He attracted attention. I deflected it. Or thought I did. I met him my first week at university.
Aiden—tall, thin, charismatic—got much attention. Friendships begun without reason and ended without conclusion.
Aiden’s hair was longer than mine, a mane above punky clothes with clothespins and whatnot. My hair was uncombed above 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. 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.
We establish a rapport, as strangers improbably again confined to the same pressurized space might do. The not-impossible notion that the universe decided we needed to have this conversation for reasons that would never become clear.
We descend toward Chicago. A familiar approach. The lake, the grid, the illusion of order imposed on something far less structured.
The plane begins its descent, which is the part where gravity reasserts itself and everyone pretends their life is about to become organized again. We land. People stand up immediately, as they always do, despite the complete lack of anywhere to go.
“It was nice talking to you,” you say.
“Of course,” I reply.
That earns the faintest hint of approval from you.
I gather my things. You nod. I suppose this too will been be noted.
Then standing to let the aisle clear, I watch you go, still unsure whether I have been questioned, assessed, or merely noticed.
Then you are gone, absorbed into the slow moving line of persons returning to their lives.
I lean back in my seat again before gathering my things and close my eyes. The drowsiness engages again immediately.
Somewhere, another file has just been updated.
My next trip to Mexico is certain to be even more memorable. My wife Amy is coming back to the States soon. She wants me to bring some of 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 lb, 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 four or five hours from Mexico City to Chicago when you fly direct and I am always happy to talk.
This does not feel like reassurance.
In my experience, the distinction collapses with time.
There are always photographs.