PART ONE
-1-
Words, sentences, numbers, distance to destination.
The man touched the button and his seat moved from its upright position. He found himself staring up at the nearest of the small screens located just below the overhead bin, words and numbers changing with the progress of the flight. Altitude, air temperature, speed, time of arrival. He wanted to sleep but kept on looking.
Heure à Paris. Heure à London.
“Look,” he said, and the woman nodded faintly but kept on writing in a little blue notebook.
He began to recite the words and numbers aloud because it made no sense, it had no effect, if he simply noted the changing details only to lose each one instantly in the twin drones of mind and aircraft.
“Okay. Altitude thirty-three thousand and two feet. Nice and precise,” he said. “Température extérieure minus fifty-eight C.”
He paused, waiting for her to say Celsius, but she looked at the notebook on the tray table in front of her and then thought a while before continuing to write.
“Okay. Time in New York twelve fifty-five. Doesn’t say a.m. or p.m. Not that we have to be told.”
Sleep was the point. He needed to sleep. But the words and numbers kept coming.
“Arrival time sixteen thirty-two. Speed four seventy-one m.p.h. Time to destination three thirty-four.”
“I’m thinking back to the main course,” she said. “I’m also thinking about the champagne with cranberry juice.”
“But you didn’t order it.”
“Seemed pretentious. But I’m looking forward to the scones later in the flight.”
She was talking and writing simultaneously.
“I like to pronounce the word properly,” she said. “An abbreviated letter o. As in scot or trot. Or is it scone as in moan?”
He was watching her write. Was she writing what she was saying, what they were both saying?
She said, “Celsius. Cap C. It was someone’s name. Can’t recall his first name.”
“Okay. What about vitesse. What does vitesse mean?”
“I’m thinking about Celsius and his work on the centigrade measurement.”
“Then there’s Fahrenheit.”
“Him too.”
“What does vitesse mean?”
“What?”
“Vitesse.”
“Vitesse. Speed,” she said.
“Vitesse. Seven hundred forty-eight k per hour.”
His name was Jim Kripps. But for all the hours of this flight, his name was his seat number. This was the rooted procedure, his own, in accordance with the number stamped on his boarding pass.
“He was Swedish,” she said.
“Who?”
“Mr. Celsius.”
“Did you sneak a look at your phone?”
“You know how these things happen.”
“They come swimming out of deep memory. And when the man’s first name comes your way, I will begin to feel the pressure.”
“What pressure?”
“To produce Mr. Fahrenheit’s first name.”
She said, “Go back to your sky-high screen.”
“This flight. All the long flights. All the hours. Deeper than boredom.”
“Activate your tablet. Watch a movie.”
“I feel like talking. No headphone. We both feel like talking.”
“No earbuds,” she said. “Talk and write.”
She was Jim’s wife, dark-skinned, Tessa Berens, Caribbean-European-Asian origins, a poet whose work appeared often in literary journals. She also spent time, online, as an editor with an advisory group that answered questions from subscribers on subjects ranging from hearing loss to bodily equilibrium to dementia.
Here, in the air, much of what the couple said to each other seemed to be a function of some automated process, remarks generated by the nature of airline travel itself. None of the ramblings of people in rooms, in restaurants, where major motion is stilled by gravity, talk free-floating. All these hours over oceans or vast landmasses, sentences trimmed, sort of self-encased, passengers, pilots, cabin attendants, every word forgotten the moment the plane sets down on the tarmac and begins to taxi endlessly toward an unoccupied jetway.
He alone would remember some of it, he thought, middle of the night, in bed, images of sleeping people bundled into airline blankets, looking dead, the tall attendant asking if she could refill his wineglass, flight ending, seatbelt sign going off, the sense of release, passengers standing in the aisles, waiting, attendants at the exit, all their thank-yous and nodding heads, the million-mile smiles.
“Find a movie. Watch a movie.”
“I’m too sleepy. Distance to destination, one thousand six hundred and one miles. Time in London eighteen o four. Speed four hundred sixty-five m.p.h. I’m reading whatever appears. Durée du vol three forty-five.”
She said, “What time is the game?”
“Six-thirty kickoff.”
“Do we get home in time?”
“Didn’t I read it off the screen? Arrival time whatever whatever.”
“We land in Newark, don’t forget.”
The game. In another life she might be interested. The flight. She wanted to be where she was going without this intermediate episode. Does anyone like long flights? She clearly was not anyone.
“Heure à Paris nineteen o eight,” he said. “Heure à London eighteen o eight. Speed four hundred sixty-three m.p.h. We just lost two miles per hour.”
“Okay I’ll tell you what I’m writing. Simple. Some of the things we saw.”
“In what language?”
“Elementary English. The cow jumped over the moon.”
“We have pamphlets, booklets, entire volumes.”
“I need to see it in my handwriting, perhaps twenty years from now, if I’m still alive, and find some missing element, something I don’t see right now, if we’re all still alive, twenty years, ten years.”
“Filling time. There’s also that.”
“Filling time. Being boring. Living life.”
“Okay. Température extérieure minus fifty-seven F,” he said. “I’m doing my best to pronounce elementary French. Distance to destination one thousand five hundred seventy-eight miles. We should have contacted the car service.”
“We’ll jump in a taxi.”
“All these people, a flight like this. They have cars waiting. The huge scramble at the exits. They know exactly where to go.”
“They checked their baggage, most of them, some of them. We did not. Our advantage.”
“Time in London eighteen eleven. Arrival time sixteen thirty-two. That was the last arrival time. Reassuring, I guess. Time in Paris nineteen eleven. Altitude thirty-three thousand and three feet. Durée du vol three sixteen.”
Saying the words and numbers, speaking, detailing, allowed these indicators to live a while, officially noted, or voluntarily noted—the audible scan, he thought, of where and when.
She said, “Close your eyes.”
“Okay. Speed four hundred seventy-six miles per hour. Time to destination.”
She was right, let’s not check our bags, we can squeeze them into the overhead. He watched the screen and thought about the game, briefly, forgetting who the Titans were playing.