Revolve

You don’t remember buying the ticket. The next thing you knew you were passing airport security. Everything you owned, in the backpack on your back. Everything else. Sold to too many inane, stupid hoarders. This carnival mirror of pack rats. Craiglist and ebay and OfferUp and Facebook Marketplace. Next thing you knew you were at launch angle, rubber’s last kiss of the black-streaked tarmac, escaping the city and the rain, bursting through the clouds into the bright blue desert concealed above the ever last overcast Emerald City.

The thing about flying is how close to death you really are.

A Libyan’s Semtex offering to Allah explodes a 747 into four million pieces of metal and plastic and flesh and bones over Lockerbie. 270 dead.

A cost-cutting subcontractor crams live oxygen canisters into the cargo hold of an idling DC-9. Ten minutes later the plane, with flames and smoke eating the passengers alive, mercifully spikes into the mush of the Everglades. Thwooomp. Fire extinguished. 110 dead. Alligator kibble.

A team of software engineers, too clever by half, codes a 737 MAX to do an anti-stall high dive into the Java Sea. 189 dead. They blame the foreigner at the yoke - inference inferior. Then, for an encore, they hit refresh and do it again five months later. This time Ethiopia. Blood and fuel soaks into the parched cracks of dry land. 157 dead.

That planes stay in the air at all is the real surprise.

A symphony of millions of parts and thousands of people all doing their jobs with competence and precision and without distraction. People who fight with nagging wives and cover bruises from abusive husbands and who have children with cancer and who have parents with dementia. People who drink and smoke and snort and pop. Endless opportunities to upset that delicate balance of flight: lift, weight, thrust, and drag.

Flying puts your life in the hands of a chain of a million links. One weak link. One fight. One addiction. One distraction. And boom. You’re an offering. Allah ma’ak. And thwoomp. You’re a wet spot in a dust crater. Return 0.

Maybe that’d be alright.

That people get on planes at all is the real surprise.

And yet here you are. Seated in the aisle. Your life in a million hands. Coach class. Back with the chattel. The aisle seat forces your shoulder into the walkway. Bumped by beverage carts and passengers with impossibly small bladders and impossibly wide hips making their way, again, and again, and again to the bathroom. Bump, bump, bump.

Your earbuds play the Beatle’s Revolver album. On shuffle. Like a heathen. Eleanor Rigby starts. Flying solo, you are one of those lonely people.

That some people don’t like the Beatles is the real surprise.

The key to flying coach is deceit. You tell yourself it’s not that bad. The immobility and blood clots. The stale air. The baby crying. The kid kicking your seat. Typhoid Mary next to you wet-coughing up a lung. The fucker that keeps farting death and onions.

It’s not that bad you say.

It could be worse you say.

That people don’t just freak the fuck out and go all dervish and fisticuffs is the real surprise.

First class visible through the mesh curtain. Up front with their hot wash cloths and better food. Shiny utensils and stemmed plastic glassware. The young, hot flight attendant with the blond hair and perky tits attentively refilling gratis wine.

Coach should march on first class with their TSA approved armaments - safety razors and nail clippers and knitting needles and crochet hooks. The liberation of miniature vodkas and miniature whiskeys and miniature rums to numb the misery of air travel.

Somewhere on the flight is an undercover sky marshal. Their official job, to quell the next act of terrorism. The next Twin Towers. The next Lockerbie. We know better. The sky marshal’s real purpose is to keep coach in its place. To keep coach from charging the cockpit and demanding rights. More leg room. Free liquor. A better destination. A better life.

When the beverage cart finally turtles to your row you order a double whiskey and coke. Your shoulder still wears the indentation from the beverage cart as it passed half a movie ago. You pull out your credit card and gripe about the cost.

The whiskey feels good. Little burn in your throat. Little warmth in your stomach. Little numb in your brain. Harrison’s compressed-chunky voice sings Taxman in your earbuds.

The edge of the emergency exit diagram protrudes from the seat back pocket. The emergency placard was once accompanied by a copy of SkyMall shopping magazine. Before smartphones and in-seat smart screens, SkyMall was the in-flight entertainment. The Sharper Image meets a pet store meets a Target meets a Spencer’s novelty mall store. Nostalgic.

The seat back pocket is a black hole that not even memory can escape. The event horizon of the anxiously slow deplaning process has a way of consuming the memory of stowed wallets, passports, glasses, iPads, and Kindles. You finger the flap open and peek inside like a kid checking behind the silver dispensary flap of a gum ball machine. Inside you find a book the size of a motel Bible bound in black, stippled leather. The book feels warm to the touch. Soft. The edge of the pages are uneven. The leather distressed. The manufactured defects are perfectly imperfect.

Your shoulder gets bumped again. Another bladder heads for relief. Her hips the width of the aisle. Her stomach ate a basketball. Is there such a thing as a fourth trimester? Twins?

That she can fit into an airplane bathroom is the real surprise.

Riffling through the pages of the book reveals page after page of handwritten text and drawings. Different color pens. Black and blue and green and red. Scratchy, frenetic, jagged art. Angular, aggressive cursive.

You thumb it open, somewhere near the middle and the page is blank. You turn back a page. Blank. You turn back a clump of pages. Still blank. Every random page you check, still stark white. Empty. Nothing. The entire book is just blank sheet after blank sheet.

Confused you riffle it again and the the pages come back to life. Text and drawings blink at you. The art this time is meticulous. An artist’s hand. The text blocky and perfect. No colors on this riffle through. Solid black.

You squeeze your eyes together in an exaggerated over-blink. A flock of crows dance in the corners of your eyes. Your forehead of plantation shutters.

You carefully, slowly, methodically, delicately fold back the leather cover revealing the first page. A game of slow-motion peek-a-boo. Stalking. The black leather is supple and bends in your hand. The book wants to be open.

The page is blank.

You turn the page. Slowly.

Blank.

You turn another page.

Blank.

You riffle the pages and once again, they come to life. No art this time. Just bubbly, loopy cursive handwriting in blue ink. A woman’s handwriting. Every page. Back to front. A novella of text.

You pinch the book closed with both hands.

A little girl peeks between the seats in front of you. Red, curly hair and green eyes. Small hands clutching a Barbie. She looks at the book you’re holding. The blank book full of text and drawings and nothing. She raises her eyebrows, holds eye contact until you break, then spins back around.

The seat-kicker behind you begins anew. Farts of death and onions propagate. The baby cries louder. The coughing gets wetter.

This flight was to be an escape. This one-way flight. You turned in your notice. You sold everything in your apartment. A storage unit would have been easier. Less final. But that was the point. No pressure release valve. No backup plan. No just in case. You pushed all your chips into the pot. All or nothing.

You turned off the electric and the water and the gas. You let the lease expire. You tossed half-used condiments into the dumpster, defrosted the freezer, and placed a fresh box of Baking Soda in the fridge. You vacuumed the carpet for the last time then sold the vacuum to the neighbor. You spent the last night sleeping on the carpet. Your backpack was your pillow. Your jacket was your blanket. Your apartment was an empty shell. Your life, this part of your life, neatly bookended.

Ding. The seat belt light turns on. The pilot, in his soothing, authoritative pilot voice, does his announcements. Your cruising altitude is measured in tens of thousand of feet. Your cruising speed is measured in hundreds of miles per hour. Your estimated time of arrival is on schedule. And click he’s gone.

The cabin is drowned in a sea of white noise. The beverage cart disappears into the back with the flight attendants.

The misery resumes. Kicks to your seat back. Fumigating farts. Hacking coughs. Babies crying. The flight carries on.

The sunset blinks into night at the time-lapse time travel of Mach point eight.

The cabin lights dim.

City lights wink in the distant dark.

You return the book to the seat back pocket. The empty book full of writing and drawings and nothing. The book of curiosity that tells you to get some sleep because your eyes must be playing tricks on you. Stress does weird things.

That stress brings out the worst in us is no surprise.

You close your eyes and somehow, through the cacophony of bumps and smells, nod off. The trippy, reverse guitar and repetitive drum beat of Tomorrow Never Knows carries you away.

You wake to poking at your knee. The red-headed girl is reaching her skinny arm through the seats and poking you awake.

The little red-headed girl’s lips are moving.

You pry Lennon’s voice singing She Said She Said out of your ears and lean forward.

Aren’t you going to do something she asks.

You ignore her, return the ear bud, and close your eyes.

She taps your knee again, in perfect rhythm to the song in your ears.

Slowly you tense your eyes back open. You make a circle motion with your finger. Turn around you mouth the words to her. She ignores you.

You eye the aisle seat to seek salvation from the parental unit. Mom’s head is canted and her jaw has fallen open. She won’t be saving you. The other seat is empty.

You pull your ear bud back out.

Lennon goes quiet.

We’re waiting the little red-headed girls says.

You head shake your lack of understanding. What?

For you to do something she explains. Eyes wide, rolling back, her turn now to shake her head. Her red curls bouncing. She spins around, exasperated. Puts her head in her praying palms and resumes watching the screen in the seat back in front of her.

Earbuds in.

Lennon singing lyrics of death and sadness.

Eyes closed. You eventually get back to sleep.

You dream of the book. The transformation. The riffle of full pages. The static emptiness. In your dream you can do the impossible. You open the book and the ink doesn’t disappear. The writing is like a doctor’s signature. Indecipherable scribble. You can make out a couple words here and another couple words there.

…won’t end…

…a decision…

…refuse…

…FUCK…

That doctor’s are taught to write like this on purpose is the real surprise.

You are startled awake by an impact to your crotch. A grunt involuntarily escapes your throat. The empty book of drawings and text from the seat back weighs heavily in your lap. You sprinkler head an accusatory gaze but nobody acts the innocent culprit. The little red-headed girl with the green eyes and the Shirley Temple curls turns around and grins at you between the seats.

Her eyes go too wide. Her smiles goes too big revealing little baby teeth that are too long and too sharp.

You have to choose, silly, she giggles. Her voice still girlish. Little. High.

Her mouth grows larger, another row of pointy teeth fills in behind the first. This deep-sea, Shirley Temple lantern fish.

She giggles.

You have to choose, her voice now growing deeper. Raspy. Loud.

Her face pushing through the seats. The skin being pulled back. The holes for her eyes and her mouth and her nostrils stretching. Her gaping mouth now growing wider still. The peeled back skin revealing pink flesh and red veins and blue capillaries and clear, viscous fluid.

Her de-skinned face and bulging eyes and rows of piranha teeth now inches from yours. You have to choose she growls. Saliva stretching across her maw in criss-crossing strings. She wails, a high-pitched siren, crescendoing into a wet hacking cough, her breath like onions and death.

You are startled awake by a tap on the shoulder. Your arms lash out in defense, palms out, deflecting the attacker.

The window seat splays her fingers at you in apology.

A nightmare.

Sorry, sorry, sorry window seat says. I didn’t mean to scare you she says. She’s impossibly old and frail. The age of a person when they’ve become a living ghost of their former selves. All gray skin and liver spots and ready to die and see Ralph again.

Fuck.

You collect yourself and stand up to let the old woman out. She barely clears the seat backs as she makes her way to the aisle and then toddles back towards the bathrooms. You eye the red-headed girl’s Mom in the aisle seat in front of you. She’s still zonked. The red-headed girl, however, is absent. She’s not in the aisles. She’s not in another row. She’s gone. Too young to have gone to the bathroom by herself.

That the little girl has disappeared is the real surprise.

You take your seat.

You retrieve the book from the seat back pocket.

You riffle it. New handwriting. New pictures. Never able to actually make anything out. The riffle too fast for that.

You try a slow riffle.

The pages go blank.

You open it.

Blank.

Turn the page.

Blank.

Fast riffle.

New text and pictures.

The red-headed little girl peeks through the seats.

You double-take her appearance.

Where were you?

She ignores your question. You still haven’t figured it out have you, she asks.

Figure what out? Exasperation. Nothing makes sense. Disoriented. Foot out of bed on the floor trying to keep the world from spinning.

She shakes her head in disappointment.

A shrill alarm fills the cabin. Red lights flash. Oxygen masks drop from the ceiling in unison, curly like umbilical cords. A crack appears in the skin of the plane letting in the dark night sky and the freezing air. A quick thought of whelp, this isn’t good. An understatement. Your oxygen mask dances in the wind evading your frantic grasp. No matter.

The plane bursts into puzzle pieces. Your chair stays with a piece of the fuselage that includes the row ahead of you. The row with the little girl and the sleeping mom.

The jet fuel, no longer contained in wing tanks, ignites. The flames lick into a beautiful arc.

You twist and spin and flip getting tilt-a-whirl visions of the rest of the plane spraying into the night. Other sections of the plane. Other rows of seats. Other passengers. A wing this way. A jet engine that way. Whether it’s the g-force, the lack of oxygen, or the cold that ultimately renders you unconscious, your last vision is the red-headed little girl twisting around and looking at you through the seats. She tsks you condescendingly and shakes her head. See what you did.

That this isn’t the end of you is the real surprise.

Sometimes your stupid monkey brain forgets to breathe. You wake up, mouth agape, gasping for air. Sleep apnea. We’ve become weaker and weaker version of our forefathers. Weaker physically. Weaker mentally. Weaker in every measurable way. We stuff our faces with unhealthy slop. We demand only that our bodies are able to sit in front of a screen for hours on end. We’re fatter, dumber, sicker and now we can’t even sleep without assistance.

And that’s where you found yourself. Mouth agape, gasping for air, with Good Day Sunshine playing in your earbuds. The old lady in the window seat staring at you. Concerned for you. The evening sky settling into a shade of orange. Then red. Then black. This high- flying, death-defying time-lapse of travel.

The captain’s voice comes over the intercom. The soothing, easy, you-are-in-good-hands voice. You are cruising at an altitude of this and a speed of that and we’ll be there on time.

On time.

You rub your eyes with your palms, pressing stars into the jelly. The stubble on your face more than a five o’clock shadow of scratch.

Eleanor Rigby clicks on. You are still flying solo. You are still one of the lonely people.

The drink cart sloths its way to your row.

Double whiskey and Coke on the credit card.

Do you get it yet? The little, curly-haired, red-headed girl with the impossibly green eyes asks through the seats.

Do you understand?