Arrival time sixteen thirty. Température extérieure minus forty-seven C. Time in Paris twenty thirteen. Altitude thirty-four thousand and two feet. He liked the two feet. Definitely worth noting. Outside air temperature minus fifty-three F. Distance de parcours.
The Seahawks, of course.
Kripps was a tall man’s name and he was tall, yes, but noncommittally so, and had no trouble meeting his need to be nondescript. He was not a proud head bobbing above a crowd but a hunched figure blessed by anonymity.
Then he thought back to the boarding process, all passengers seated finally, meal soon to appear, warm wet towels for the hands, toothbrush, toothpaste, socks, water bottle, pillow to go with the blanket.
Did he feel an element of shame in the presence of these features? They’d decided to fly business class despite the expense because the cramped space in tourist on a long flight was a challenge they wanted to avoid this one time.
Eye mask, face moisturizer, the cart with wines and liquors that an attendant pushes along the aisle now and then.
He watched the dangling screen and what he felt was the nudge of dumb indulgence. He thought of himself as strictly tourist. Planes, trains, restaurants. He never wanted to be well-dressed. It seemed the handiwork of a fraudulent second self. Man in the mirror, how impressed he is by the trimness of his image.
“Which was the rainy day?” she said.
“You’re noting the rainy day in your book of memories. The rainy day, immortalized. The whole point of a holiday is to live it outstandingly. You’ve said this to me. To keep the high points in mind, the vivid moments and hours. The long walks, the great meals, the wine bars, the nightlife.”
He wasn’t listening to what he was saying because he knew it was stale air.
“Jardin du Luxembourg, Ile de la Cité, Notre-Dame, crippled but living. Centre Pompidou. I still have the ticket stub.”
“I need to know the rainy day. It’s a question of looking at the notes years from now and seeing the precision, the detail.”
“You can’t help yourself.”
“I don’t want to help myself,” she said. “All I want to do is get home and look at a blank wall.”
“Time to destination one hour twenty-six. I’ll tell you what I can’t remember. The name of this airline. Two weeks ago, starting out, different airline, no bilingual screen.”
“But you’re happy about the screen. You like your screen.”
“It helps me hide from the noise.”
Everything predetermined, a long flight, what we think and say, our immersion in a single sustained overtone, the engine roar, how we accept the need to accommodate it, keep it tolerable even if it isn’t.
A seat that adapts to the passenger’s wish for a massage.
“Speaking of remember. I remember now,” she said.
“What?”
“Came out of nowhere. Anders.”
“Anders.”
“The first name of Mr. Celsius.”
“Anders,” he said.
“Anders Celsius.”
She found this satisfying. Came out of nowhere. There is almost nothing left of nowhere. When a missing fact emerges without digital assistance, each person announces it to the other while looking off into a remote distance, the otherworld of what was known and lost.
“Children on this flight. Well-behaved,” he said.
“They know they’re not in economy. They sense their responsibility.”
She spoke and wrote simultaneously, head down.
“Okay. Altitude ten thousand three hundred sixty-four feet. Time in New York fifteen o two.”
“Except we’re going to Newark.”
“We don’t have to see every minute of the game.”
“I don’t.”
“I don’t,” he said.
“Of course you do.”
He decided to sleep for half an hour or until an attendant showed up with a snack before they landed. Tea and sweets. The plane began to bounce side to side. He knew that he was supposed to ignore this and that Tessa was supposed to shrug and say, Smooth ride up to now. The seatbelt sign flashed red. He tightened his seatbelt and looked at the screen while she went into a deeper crouch, her body nearly folding into her notebook. The bouncing became severe, altitude, air temperature, speed, he kept reading the screen but saying nothing. They were drowning in noise. A woman came staggering down the aisle, returning to the front row after a visit to the toilet, grabbing seatbacks for balance. Voices on the intercom, one of the pilots in French and then one of the attendants in English, and he thought that he might resume reading aloud from the screen but decided this would be a case of witless persistence in the midst of mental and physical distress. She was looking at him now, not writing just looking, and it occurred to him that he ought to move his seat to its upright position. She was already upright and she slid her food tray into the slot and put her notebook and pen in the seat pocket. A massive knocking somewhere below them. The screen went blank. Pilot speaking French, no English follow-up. Jim gripped the arms of his seat and then checked Tessa’s seatbelt and retightened his. He imagined that every passenger was looking straight ahead into the six o’clock news, at home, on Channel 4, waiting for word of their crashed airliner.
“Are we afraid?” she said.
He let this question hover, thinking tea and sweets, tea and sweets.
-2-
Let the impulse dictate the logic.
This was the gambler’s creed, his formal statement of belief.
They sat waiting in front of the superscreen TV. Diane Lucas and Max Stenner. The man had a history of big bets on sporting events and this was the final game of the football season, American football, two teams, eleven players each team, rectangular field one hundred yards long, goal lines and goal posts at either end, the national anthem sung by a semi-celebrity, six U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds streaking over the stadium.
Max was accustomed to being sedentary, attached to a surface, his armchair, sitting, watching, cursing silently when the field goal fails or the fumble occurs. The curse was visible in his slit eyes, right eye nearly shut, but depending on the game situation and the size of the wager, it might become a full-face profanity, a life regret, lips tight, chin quivering slightly, the wrinkle near the nose tending to lengthen. Not a single word, just this tension, and the right hand moving to the left forearm to scratch anthropoidally, primate style, fingers digging into flesh.
On this day, Super Bowl LVI in the year 2022, Diane was seated in the rocker five feet from Max, and between and behind them was her former student Martin, early thirties, bent slightly forward in a kitchen chair.
Commercials, station breaks, pregame babble.
Max, speaking over his shoulder, “The money is always there, the point spread, the bet itself. But consciously I recognize a split. Whatever happens on the field I have the point spread secured in mind but not the bet itself.”
“Big dollars. But the actual amount,” Diane said, “is a number he keeps to himself. It is sacred territory. I am waiting for him to die first so he can tell me in his final breath how much money he has pissed away in the years of our something-or-other partnership.”
“Ask her how many years.”
The young man said nothing.
“Thirty-seven years,” Diane said. “Not unhappily but in states of dire routine, two people so clutched together that the day is coming when each of us will forget the other’s name.”