Turbulence

by David Szalay

  ‘You must be excited about that then.’

  ‘I am.’

  She was also nervous, and she had wanted something to take her mind off it. That something had turned out to be him. He was what the app had offered her.

  When she kissed him, mostly just to end a silence that was starting to turn awkward, he had frozen for a few seconds of startled passivity and then started kissing her back.

  While he was in the shower, she looked at her list of interview questions. (He had asked her, politely, whether she had a spare towel. She had fetched one and handed it to him. He had thanked her.) She looked over the list of questions as she waited for the coffee to froth up in the pan. The first question was about whether Mackenzie felt wiser now than when she was yonger and … The sound of the shower was still going on. She hoped she wouldn’t have to knock on the door and tell him to hurry up. She should have made him leave last night, obviously. That she had not done that had something to do with an exchange that happened afterwards, as they lay there sweatily in the dark, each seemingly intent on their own thoughts. He had asked her, unexpectedly, how old she was. ‘Thirty-three,’ she said, ‘like it says on my profile.’ He was silent for so long that she thought he might have fallen asleep. Then he spoke again. ‘Are you happy?’ he asked. It was a serious question and she tried to answer with the same seriousness. ‘What is happy?’

  ‘Well if you had to say whether you were happy or unhappy,’ he said, ‘which would it be?’

  She thought about it. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  There was another long silence and then he said, ‘Are you happy that you’re alive?’

  That was an easier question to answer. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m happy that I’m alive.’

  She let him put his arms around her, and he fell asleep like that, holding her as if she was someone he knew, and though she had slipped out of his embrace, she had not woken him, he was sleeping so quietly. She turned off the gas under the coffee and waited while it simmered down. The sound of the shower was still going on, and she went and knocked on the door. ‘I have to leave in five minutes.’ The shower stopped. ‘I have to leave in five minutes,’ she said again.

  ‘Okay,’ his voice said.

  There was, she felt, no sense of urgency in it.

  ‘Okay?’ she asked.

  Nothing.

  She went back to the living room, which had the kitchen at one end of it, and poured coffee from the little pan into a mug. She added milk and sugar. She was just lifting the mug to her mouth when she noticed his purple shirt on the floor – that had come off while they were still on the sofa. She put the mug down and took the shirt into the bedroom, where he was unhurriedly towelling his hair. ‘Here’s your shirt,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  There was always something exciting about seeing someone naked for the first time, and his nakedness, now, the next morning, still had some of that quality. She felt it as she stood there, her heart perceptibly quickening. When he took the shirt from her he held onto her hand for a moment. ‘I have to go,’ she said.

  A few minutes later he appeared in the living room, dressed and looking slightly dazed, as if he still hadn’t worked out where he was and what was happening.

  She said, ‘My Uber will be here in a minute.’

  ‘Okay.’ He sat on the sofa and started to put on his shoes. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked. ‘The airport?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Guarulhos?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I come with you?’

  The question seemed weird. ‘Why?’ she asked, making sure she had her passport.

  ‘I need to go there,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  As he finished tying his shoes he said something about supervising the loading of the plane – the freighter, he must have meant – and offered to pay half the Uber fare. She said that wasn’t necessary.

  They took the lift down to street level in silence.

  Her apartment was in a pale tower, one of several nearly identical ones, next to a highway. The tops of the towers disappeared into cloud and a tangible dampness filled the air outside, where the Uber was waiting – a charcoal Prius slick with moisture.

  They got in on opposite sides, and she told the driver to take them to the airport.

  They probably seemed like a couple who had just had an argument, she thought – the way they stared out of their windows at the rainy, grey cityscape as it went past. On either side of the highway there was dull warehousing, industrial parks. The traffic was heavy, and she looked at her watch more nervously each time the Uber slowed into another tailback, or arrived just too late at some lights.

  At some imperceptible point, as the traffic thickened and their progress slowed, the idea that she might miss the plane started to acquire the qualities of an actual possibility. She leaned pointlessly forward in her seat to look out through the windscreen at the mass of tail lights ahead.

  The pilot said, ‘What time is your flight?’

  When she told him, he looked at his own watch and said, ‘It’s tight.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  They had stopped again. The driver sighed, as if in apology, though it wasn’t his fault, and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel.

  ‘How long is the flight from here?’ the pilot asked. ‘To Toronto. Nine hours?’

  ‘More like ten,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘Yah. People are always amazed,’ he said, ‘how that part of North America is nearer to, like, Moscow than it is to here.’

  She leaned forward into the space between the two front seats and asked the driver, in Portuguese, whether there was any other way he could go.

  He shrugged and said he could try Via dos Trabalhadores. ‘Why don’t you do that?’ she said.

  ‘People have no sense of geography,’ the pilot said. ‘How the world fits together, you know.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  ‘Is it Air Canada?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What aircraft do they use on that sector?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  The traffic had moved on a little and they were now first in line at the next lights.

  She said to the driver, ‘Why don’t you turn here? And take Via dos Trabalhadores?’

  Without saying anything the driver put his indicator on, and when the lights changed he made the turn, even though he was in the wrong lane. She looked at her watch. Unless they were there in the next fifteen minutes, she thought, she would miss it. She might miss it anyway. She should just accept that she had missed it, she told herself.

  A few minutes later signs for the airport started to appear.

  And then a plane, low in the sky, materialising suddenly out of the white vapour. They were nearly there, and she started to think, with something more than mad hope, that she might make the flight after all.

  ‘Will we see each other again?’ the pilot asked.

  The question surprised her.

  ‘I thought it was fun, last night,’ he said.

  ‘It was. Sure.’

  They had to stop for the driver to take a ticket from a machine.

  The pilot said, ‘You know, I never slept with a black girl before.’

  She laughed, and didn’t know what to say. ‘No?’

  ‘No,’ he said, smiling at her. ‘Was my first time.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘It’s terminal three,’ she told the driver, after looking it up on her phone. He nodded.

  The pilot was saying something about when he would be in São Paulo again.

  And then they were there – joining a line of parked taxis in front of the mirrored surface of the terminal.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said to the driver, jumping out.

  The driver more slowly moved round to lift her suitcase from the trunk. She took it from him and thanked him again.

  The pilot was standing there, in his purple shirt and his sung
lasses, despite the lack of sun.

  ‘Bye,’ she said. Then she was dragging her suitcase at a half-jog towards the terminal entrance and didn’t hear what, if anything, he offered in return.

  5

  YYZ – SEA

  SHE WAS VERY apologetic but she told the interviewer – a young woman who had flown all the way from Brazil – that she had to leave immediately. ‘My daughter has just gone into labour,’ she explained. ‘In Seattle. The only flight they have today leaves in—’ She looked at her watch. ‘Exactly two hours. So I have to dash. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Oh,’ the interviewer said. ‘Well …’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Marion said again, when the woman showed no sign of moving from her sofa.

  ‘Well would it be okay,’ the interviewer asked, finally standing, ‘if I emailed you some questions?’

  ‘Of course it would. Yes, of course. I’m just going to throw some things in a suitcase,’ Marion said, and she left the room.

  She had been in the middle of answering a question about cultural appropriation when the phone had interrupted her. Something had told her not to ignore it.

  They parted on the sidewalk in front of the house, with the taxi waiting there, Marion asking if she could give her interviewer a lift, and the interviewer saying that she was fine, thank you.

  The only direct flight from Toronto to Seattle that day was on one of the no-frills airlines which Marion still thought of as a new phenomenon, though they had been around for decades. From her narrow seat, she looked down at what was probably North Dakota. The plane swayed lightly from side to side as she peered at the pale landscape passing slowly underneath. It was hard to tell at times whether the expanse of whiteness she saw was cloud or the surface of the earth, where people actually lived. Sometimes the dark threads of roads gave it away. Marion was able to imagine what it would be like down there. She herself had started life in a place like that. Hard and flat, and hostile to things that lacked obvious utility. There had been a library in that small Manitoban town, and she had spent most of her time there when she was in her early teens. People had said of her then that she had her head in the clouds, and it was true that she had liked looking at the sky – that she had often thought it was the only thing worth looking at there.

  The plane shook and tumbled over the mountains and fell through the clouds towards Sea-Tac, from where Marion phoned Doug, while waiting at the luggage carousel. He didn’t answer, but phoned her back a few minutes later to tell her the news. As he told her she was jostled by someone moving forward for their luggage. She didn’t notice, even when they swore at her. She said, ‘Oh Doug. How are they?’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. She thought he might have sounded happier – no doubt he was in shock, like most first-time fathers.

  She told him she would see him soon.

  It was still only mid-afternoon, Pacific time, but the weather, the pouring rain, meant the light outside gave the impression of dusk.

  When she arrived, Doug wasn’t around. He had gone home for a while, the nurse thought, when Marion presented herself, still with her suitcase, at the maternity department somewhere high up in the hospital. She waited – not taking a seat as she had been invited to – while the nurse went to see whether Annie was awake. The nurse returned and told her that she was. ‘Put these on please,’ the nurse said, offering her what seemed to be a shoebox full of blue shower caps. It took her a moment to understand what they were. She sat down to stretch two of them over her shoes. When she had done that, the nurse directed her to a dispenser of disinfectant gel for her hands. Then she said, ‘Go down the hall, second room on your left.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Marion said, and went.

  With her heart thumping, she went.

  She saw them through the glass panel in the door – Annie sitting up in the bed, with the tiny thing, wearing a onesie that Marion herself had sent, held uncertainly to her chest. Marion paused outside the door, wanting to hold on to this moment of seeing them like that. She wiped a single surprising tear from her eye, and then a second. And then laughed for a moment, silently, at the fact that she was shedding tears. Then she pushed the door open and went in. She was smiling. Annie looked up and immediately said, almost shouted at her, ‘He’s blind.’

  Marion just stood there.

  ‘They say he’s blind,’ Annie said. ‘That’s what they say.’

  Marion, stuck in the doorway, was half-aware of the fact that she was still smiling.

  ‘That’s what they say,’ Annie said again.

  Marion knew she couldn’t just stand there.

  She had to do something.

  She stepped to the bed and took the baby from her daughter. And it was as if she hadn’t heard what Annie had said – she felt that herself, that she was just doing what she would have done if Annie hadn’t said those things.

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’ Annie asked.

  ‘Yes, I heard you.’

  ‘And? Don’t you have anything to say?’

  Marion struggled. Finally she asked, ‘Does Doug know?’

  ‘Yes. As soon as they told him,’ Annie said, in tears now, ‘he left.’

  ‘He left?’

  ‘Yes – he left!’

  Marion was staring at the hours-old thing in her hands, the red creases in the face that seemed to be made of red creases. The black feathers of hair on the tender skull. She had never warmed to newborns – even Annie had seemed ugly to her when they handed her over. In fact she didn’t like kids much at all. After Annie she had known she was done. She had had no desire to do it again, any of it. She was staring at the baby’s velvety skull and struggling again to think of something to say. ‘Does he have a name?’ she asked, finally.

  ‘Thomas,’ Annie said, with tears sliding down her face.

  ‘That’s nice.’

  Supporting the baby’s head, Marion sat carefully down on the chair that was there. He seemed weightless in her hands.

  She was very aware of her failure to be equal to the needs of this moment. That her daughter needed something from her was painfully evident. It was also painfully evident that she didn’t seem to have what was needed – didn’t even seem to know what it was.

  ‘I like it,’ she said, still talking about the name, though too much time had passed and it wasn’t obvious what she meant. And anyway it seemed like a useless thing to say, a thing which simply emphasised the fact that she had no words that might actually be able to help. She felt her own insufficiency as a human being, and more than anything she just wanted to leave – and then she felt that that desire to leave was also a kind of failure, and a shameful one, so that it was difficult even to look Annie in the eye.

  When she handed Thomas back to her, she asked, in a way that still failed to acknowledge what she had been told, if there was anything that Annie needed.

  And yes, there were some things.

  Marion, taking her pen out of her handbag, wrote a neat list.

  She wandered the aisles of the supermarket in a daze. She already knew that the significance of what had just happened would expand as time passed – would expand, in her own mind, and in Annie’s too, into something huge, into a major failure, of motherhood, of humanity, a defining event in their lives, from which neither of them would ever be entirely able to escape, whatever happened in the future. It was one of those events, she thought, that make us what we are, for ourselves and for other people. They just seem to happen, and then they’re there forever, and slowly we understand that we’re stuck with them, that nothing will ever be the same again. When someone said her name she did not, for a few seconds, understand that they were talking to her. Two women were standing there. They looked Chinese or something. The younger of the two was smiling at her. ‘Excuse me,’ she said again. ‘Are you Marion Mackenzie, the writer?’

  Marion had to think about it, she had to take a moment to ask herself whether she was in fact ‘Marion Mackenzie, the writer’. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am.’


  ‘I’m such a huge fan of yours,’ the woman said.

  ‘Thank you,’ Marion said.

  ‘My name’s Wendy.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Wendy.’

  ‘Are you okay? You seem very wet,’ Wendy said, the smile vanishing from her face. Marion was indeed very wet – she was dripping onto the floor and her hair was stuck to her forehead. She had walked for ten minutes through a downpour to get to the supermarket.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I need to buy an umbrella,’ she added, trying to make light of it.

  ‘Yes, you need one here,’ Wendy said. And then, ‘This is my mom, Jackie.’ At the sound of her name, the older woman just nodded. She was about Marion’s age.

  ‘Hello,’ Marion said to her tentatively, wondering if she even spoke English.

  ‘She’s over from Hong Kong,’ Wendy said. ‘She teaches English Lit in college there.’

  ‘Oh.’ Marion tried to seem unsurprised, and interested. ‘Okay.’

  ‘She teaches your work actually.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Well. That’s … very nice …’ Marion again looked at the older woman, Jackie, who again merely nodded, and smiled.

  Then Wendy said, ‘Well it was such a pleasure to meet you.’

  ‘You too.’

  It seemed, at that point, that the encounter was at an end. Wendy, though, had another question – ‘What are you doing in Seattle?’

  ‘I’m, uh. I’m here to visit my daughter,’ Marion said, touching her hair, and finding herself momentarily shocked at how wet it was.

  ‘She lives here?’

  ‘Yes, she does.’

  ‘Okay,’ Wendy said, full of enthusiasm. ‘Would you mind,’ she asked, ‘I know you must get this all the time, would you mind signing something for me?’ She had her handbag open and was trying to find something, some piece of paper, for Marion to sign.

  ‘Sure,’ Marion said.

  Wendy laughed. ‘I wish I had one of your books with me.’ She handed her instead a small notebook, and a pen.

  Marion wrote her name on the open page of the notebook, and handed the things back.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ Wendy said.