The diminutive television perked in the corner of the flight, monitoring our route shows that we are hovering somewhere over Iceland, the nose of our aerial vessel shooting north, blasting into the thick tufts of arctic wind, before tilting into the direction of the equatorial waist of the planet, landing on a scrolled out cement tongue runway into what I imagine to be the vernal countryside of England. I have waded in an out of sleep. The movie on the flight is CHAPLIN. I over hear Trevor telling a fellow counselor that he’s a huge Robert Downey Jr. fan.
Trevor crunches his face red with the morning pigment and looks out the window. The television lens is promulgating our voyage from the dock of Newark into port of Heathrow. The television is telling us where we are. Just as my face has been ensconced in a Plexiglas window seat throughout the duration of the day, the dotted dual marble of both my eyes branded behind the gymnastic parallel bars of my glasses, years later it will occur to me that perhaps I have been watching myself watch myself all day. That the black haired phony-tailed man wearing the pin-stripe suit, pummeling a string of sentences into his laptop was really somehow a holographic manifestation of myself, perhaps nine years later, when I taught at Greeley and wore business suits and ferried a laptop and scribed incessantly, chiseling the page from a sheet of pixilated ice into a orchard of words and sounds—that perhaps the man who so smiled at me in the bookstore was somehow—by metaphysical synchronicity baited by the hook of entanglement, by the theory that all of us are one, myself, cached behind a counter at the B. Daltons for five years or at the library for now eight. Myself, goading myself, winking back at myself from the plastic frame inside the airplane, that somehow I’ve been looking into reflections of myself from different vantage points of my life, my youth—thinking about the short haired man in the taxi, the woman in the back seat, carrying her shoes like a dead bird pinched in her hand, perhaps even the old man behind me now, stodgy and cantankerous and worth damn near six-figures a season, is some carbonization of my collective male psyche fifty years from now, going down with the ship, in a minted cremation urn, holding it as if in tithe before everything I have ever known slowly wades into dust.
I order another cup of coffee and peer out at the topography of dolloped canvases below as an orange ribbon of sunlight skirts across my face. I am five miles above land and I feel that somehow I have arrived.
The sun is hitting the side of the plane in thick orange lashes, pouring into the windows like a vodka screwdriver. I am the only one who still has the plastic slate of my window open and the old man behind me offers several grunts that perhaps I should quit drooling at the cushion of clouds below and offer the fellow passengers a few minutes of optical serenity.Apparently we are close to landing even though everything around us is still a quilled blanket of clouds—like an overturned mattress, cobbled with thick swells and canyons, the morning light seems to ricochet around different vectors of the plane, casting orbs and baubles across the slack jaws of sleeping passengers—tinkerbell in a high school thespian production of Peter Pan.
The inky tights of the stewardess rove the isles once more, pushing wobbling ball bearings of the cart of as if were a gurney, ending the flight as it convened, with inquiry to all passengers if we would like tea or coffee. The vessel descends into the spooled cannons of clouds below. The clouds are tufted rooftops, ethereal shingle lining. The sun seems pure and healthy, as unobstructed as is the sight of land below. Everyone else on the trip is restless, tired, exhaustive. The ubiquity of the crimson jackets, hormonally-imbalanced haywire freshman skirting through the aisles, giddy, homesick, free.
On the screen the trajectory arrow is reminiscent of a weather cold front on the six o’clock news showing the sweeping breath the vessel has made from Newark, New Jersey to England, the dot on the screen indicative of Heathrow is pulsating, as if we are on top of it. As if sinking, our vessel still bathed in an impenetrable current of fog.
As the vessel descends in a sliding fashion the light seems to flicker into shadows. The avenues of the clouds are thick—heavy blemishes of light immediately become clad in a patch of darkness.
There are shadows. As if the clouds are the wombs of the earth. Trevor’s hair has lost a tad of its luster. He rows his fingertips through his scalp several times before looking out the window. In the reflection of my visage was seconds earlier in the bright new sunshine of morning has quickly been superseded with thick blotches of rain, heavy flecks of drumming against the window and our vessel, heralding our arrival.
“It’ll probably be one of those landings where you don’t even see the ground until you feel the runway.” Trevor says. By the look on the atlas overhead, the pulsating punctuation tumor indicative of Heathrow we have practically arrived.
Everyone on the plane has a semblance of a junior high church group up-all-night lock-in. Faces are doughy and sleepy. An exorbitant amount of junior high girls form a line at the restroom toting cosmetic carry-ons as if they were sack lunches.
Everyone on the plane has a semblance of a junior high church group up-all-night lock-in. Faces are doughy and sleepy. An exorbitant amount of junior high girls form a line at the restroom toting cosmetic carry-ons as if they were sack lunches.
There is a jerk and a forward motion. For the past fifteen minutes the stewardesses have been imploring us to fasten our seatbelts, to keep our chairs stiff in the upright position. To adjust the tongue of our trays into the seat in front of us.
This is England—a quilted topography of moss, everything is damp and pea-flavored. Sheets of rain continue to pelt into the side of the plane and on the top of Heathrow airport almost like static.
Thick splotches of rain continue to dot the Plexiglas frame from my window seat. Above it feels as if the aerial vessel that has just chauffeured us across the bulging aquatic chest of the Atlantic is being drummed and raked with a series of steady pelts. Slowly the plane roves its way to the terminal, to the extended arm of the gate. Trevor is looking around counting heads. Charles has everyone’s passport in his gratis Parade hip sack. The rain is so thick it is hard to discern anything, although just off the thick cement carpet of the runway it appears that we can see the terminal. It appears the we can see shocks of light.
Two rows behind me I notice one of the Italian girls smiling at a witticism Spencer just offered, most notably about being a virgin and being from Utah. The man with the pin striped suit has taken out a comb and is seriously scraping it through the side of his scalp as if he is endeavoring to plow arable farmland. The rain continues. The blinking light stating that seatbelts are to remain fastened. I try to cogitate within the corona of my psyche how it could be eight hours ahead simply by traveling into the direction of the sun—I try to internally ponder just how the same slice of sun I am experiencing now will be somehow be visible to my father, come six hours, when he is finishing up my paper route and driving Tim Flanagan down to school.
I am awash in a sea of Strangers wearing red coats.
I am awash in a sea of Strangers wearing red coats.
We have arrived.
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