There was nothing funny about terrorism. Nothing even remotely funny about terrorism. Still, she was from the Midwest, and it seemed like a long time ago already. No more National Guard in the airport—those boys with their big weapons trying not to look bored and out of place around every corner. She had, herself, only been to New York a few times, and never to those towers, having only glimpsed them from her plane as it banked into LaGuardia. From the plane, they’d looked like Legos, and no matter how real she knew it all was, on the television, on the floor, it had not looked real. And the least likely plane a terrorist would want to blow up or hijack was one traveling from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Portland, Maine. Right? “Don’t unwrap that,” she said. “It’s exquisite. I trust you.”
“I insist,” he said. “This is too weird and too much of a … cliché. I have my dignity!” He laughed. “And in any case, I will doubt your sanity if you don’t let me open it. I can’t have a crazy woman delivering my mother’s birthday present—”
“No,” Kathy Bliss said, snatching the little present off his lap. “You’ll never get it wrapped like this again. It’s like a little dream. I’d be insane if I thought you could get anything but a necklace in that box.”
He made his mouth into a zero, and sighed, loosened his tie a little by inserting his index finger between the knot and his collar. From somewhere on the other side of the wall of screens that listed arrivals and departures, a baby began to cry, and the feeling came back to her—the ripping, intensely, as if yet another layer of skin, or whatever was underneath her skin, were being pulled off her torso in one quick yank. The stranger took the cell phone out of his pocket and said, “I’ll call my brother. Can I tell him your name. I’ll have him at baggage claim—I mean,” he interrupted himself here, “I’m assuming that’s where you’ll be going—” he looked at the black bag at her feet—“Did you check luggage?”
“Yes,” she said. “I mean, no. But I can go to baggage claim, no problem. Tell him—”
“I’ll have him carry a sign, with your name on it, okay?”
“Yes. Kathy Bliss.”
“Bliss?” He smiled. “Like, ‘bliss’?”
“Yes,” she said. “Like the Joseph Campbell thing. ‘Follow your bliss.’”
He smiled, but she could tell he hadn’t heard of Joseph Campbell, or the advice of Joseph Campbell. She had, herself, been in graduate school when the PBS series with Bill Moyers had aired, and gotten together every Tuesday night with a group of women from her Mind, Brain, and Violence Seminar to watch it. A lot of joking about Bliss, and following it, had been made. When she’d get up to go to the bathroom or to get a beer out of the refrigerator, someone always pretended to follow her.
“We would like to begin boarding passengers on Flight 5236 to Portland, Maine. Passengers traveling with small children or needing special assistance …”
“That’s me,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course. I’ll make the call after you board. But let me tell you, my brother—he’s twenty-two, but he looks a lot like me. I haven’t seen him in a year, and sometimes he has long hair and sometimes he shaves his head, so,” he shrugged, “who knows. But he’s about 5' 9", 160 pounds—”
Kathy Bliss slipped the gold-wrapped box into her black bag carefully, so he could see that he could trust her with it. “Well,” she said, “he’ll have my name on a piece of paper, right. It’ll be simple.”
“Am I right, the plane’s supposed to land at 12:51?” the stranger asked, peeking into the inner lining of his suit coat again, as if to look at his own unnecessary itinerary.
“Yep,” she said. “12:51, assuming we’re on time.”
“Here,” he said, hurrying with a piece of paper and a pen he’d taken from the pocket of his suitcoat, “my brother’s name is Mack Kaloustian. He’ll be there. Or I’ll kill him, and he knows it.”
Kaloustian. Armenian. Kathy Bliss blinked and saw a spray of bullets raking through a family in a stand of trees on a mountain top, a mother shielding her child, collapsing onto him. That child might have been this stranger’s grandmother. And then they were boarding her row—12. Kathy Bliss stood up and extended her hand to the stranger. “Good luck to you,” she said with all the warmth she could generate with only four words. The second word, luck, caught in her throat—a little emotional fishhook made out of consonants—because it was all so lovely, and simple, and lucky. Nothing but goodness in it for anyone. And her part in this sweet small drama moved her deeply, too—this gesture she was making of pure human camaraderie, this nonprofit venture, this small recognition of the cliché we’re all in this together. That it mattered. Love. Family. The stranger. The favor. The bond of trust between them. He knew she wouldn’t disappear into Portland with his gold necklace. She knew he wouldn’t—what? Send her onto a plane with an explosive? He shook her hand so warmly it was like a hug. He said, “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this,” and she said, “Of course. I’m happy to be able to help,” and then she walked backward so she could extend the moment of their smiling and parting, and then turned, inhaling, and began the dull and claustrophobic process of boarding her plane.
Kathy Bliss had been born and raised in a little stone house at the edge of a deep forest. “Honest to God,” she always had to say after giving someone this piece of information about herself for the first time. “But it was nothing like you’re imagining.”
Her father had worked for a minimum security prison, and the prison had been the thing her bedroom window faced, its high cyclone fencing topped by hundreds of yards of coiled razor wire. In the summer, the sun rising in the east over the prison turned that wire into a blinding fretwork, all spun-sugar and baroque glitter, as if the air had been embroidered with silver thread by a gifted witch. She’d squint at it pretending that what her bedroom faced was an enchanted castle, as if the little stone house at the edge of the dark forest really were something from a fairy tale. But it was a sedentary childhood. Her parents wouldn’t let her play in the yard or wait outside for the bus because, if there were an escape, she would make too good a hostage, being the prison director’s daughter. For this reason, Kathy Bliss rarely had the chance to see the prisoners milling around behind that razor wire, wearing their orange jumpsuits, and was able, therefore, to imagine them handsome and gallant as knights.
She and her mother had moved, when Kathy was nine, after her father died from an illness that announced itself first as bleeding gums, and then paralysis, and then he was just gone. She was thinking about this blip in her first years—the stone house, the barbed-wire castle—and watching the other passengers struggle onto the plane, shoving their heavy luggage into overhead compartments, the fat ones sweating, the thin ones trembling, the mothers with babies and little children looking blissfully burdened, when a voice came over the plane’s intercom and said, “If there is a Katherine Bliss on board, could she please press the flight attendant call button now?”
“Oh my God,” Kathy Bliss said so loudly that an old woman standing in the aisle next to her whirled around and hit the call button for her. “Is that you?” the old woman said, as if she knew what they were calling Kathy Bliss about, as if everyone knew. “Yes,” she said. “I forgot to check my messages.” “Oh dear,” the old woman said. The skin hung off her face in gray rags, and yet she’d made herself up carefully that morning, with tastefully understated foundation and blush, the kind of replica of life that would cause all gathered around her casket to say, “She just looks as if she’s sleeping.” There began a cold trickling at the tip of Kathy Bliss’s spine, and then it turned into a fine mist coating every inch of her. She could not close her mouth. She tried to stand, but there were so many people in the aisle she couldn’t get out of her seat, although the old woman had turned to face the strangers surging forward and put a bony arm in front of her as if to try to block their passage. “Ma’am,” a flight attendant said from ten feet behind that line, looking at the old woman. “Are you Mrs. Blis
s?”
“No,” the old woman said, and pointed to Kathy. “This is Mrs. Bliss.”
“We have a message for you, Mrs. Bliss,” the flight attendant called over the shoulders of the passengers in the aisle. She was a huge blond beauty, a Norse goddess. Someone who might stand on a mountain peak with a bolt of lightning in her fist. The crowd in the aisle dissolved to make way for her, and she pressed a folded piece of paper into Kathy Bliss’s shaking hand. Baby in hospital. Call home now. Husband.
It was a week later—after the long pale nights at his cribside in the hospital, taking turns pretending to sleep as the other paced, the tests, and the antibiotics, and the failure of the first ones to fight off the infection, and the terrifying night when the baby didn’t wake during his injection, and they could clearly see the residency doctor’s hand shaking as he punched the emergency button. It was after they’d begun a whole new life on the children’s floor. Sesame Street in the lounge all day, as if the world were being run by benevolent toys, and then CNN scrolling its silent, redundant messages to them all night below images of the cynical and maimed. After they’d gotten to know the nurses. It was after Kathy Bliss had fallen in love, madly, with one doctor after another—not a sexual love, but a deep wild worship of the archetype, a reverent adulation of the Healer—and then grown to despise them one by one, and then to see them merely as human beings. It was after she’d spent some self-conscious moments on her knees in the hospital chapel, which turned into deep semiconscious communions with the Almighty as the hospital intercom called out its mundane codes and locations in the hallway behind her—and the baby was taking fluids, and then solids, and then given a signature of release, and the nurses hugged Kathy Bliss and her husband, and let their hands wave magically, baptismally, over the head of the baby, who laughed, sputtered, still a little weak, scarlet-cheeked, but very much of this world, and cured for the next leg of the journey into the future, when they packed up the stuffed animals and picture books and headed for home—it was after all these events had come to an end that Kathy Bliss remembered the foreign object, given to her by the stranger, which had stayed where she’d tucked it into her carry-on luggage, where she’d left it in the hallway of her house, tossed under a table, in a panic, on her brief stop there between the airport and the hospital.
Garrett had gone to work, and the baby was napping in a patch of sunlight that poured green and gold through the front door onto the living room floor. It was a warm late summer day. The phone had been unplugged the night before, and stayed that way. She hadn’t turned the television on once since they’d come home. The silence swelled and receded in a manner that would have been imperceivable to her only two weeks before, but which now seemed sacred, full of implication, a kind of immaculate tableau rolled out over the neighborhood in the middle of the day when no one was anywhere, and only the cats crossed the streets, padding in considerate quiet on their starry little paws. She glanced at the black bag.
She got down on her knees and pulled the bag to her, and removed the umbrella, and the pink makeup bag, and the folded black sweater, the brother’s name, Mack Kaloustian (but hadn’t the stranger said he was his mother’s only son?), and saw it there, the box, in its gold paper, and recognized it only vaguely, as neither a gift nor a recrimination, a threat or a blessing.
She didn’t open it, but imagined herself opening it. Imagined herself as a passenger on that plane, unable to resist it. Holding it to her ear. Shaking it, maybe. Lifting the edge of the gold paper, tearing it away from the box. And then, the certain, brilliant cataclysm that would follow. The lurching of unsteady weight in the sky, and then the inertia, followed by tumbling. The numbing sensation of great speed and realization in your face. She’d been a fool to take it with her onto the plane. It could have killed them all.
Or, the simple gold braid of it.
Tasteful. Elegant. A thoughtful gift chosen by a devoted son for his beloved mother. And she imagined taking the necklace out of the box, holding it up to her own neck at the mirror, admiring the glint of it around her neck—this bit of love and brevity snatched from the throat of a stranger—wearing it with an evening gown, passing it down as an heirloom to her children.
Who was to say, she thought to herself as she began to peel the gold paper away, that something stolen, without malice or intent, is any less yours than something you’ve been given?
Acknowledgments
Some of these stories have been previously published in Ploughshares (“If a Stranger Approaches You about Carrying a Foreign Object with You onto the Plane”), Epoch (“Mona,” “Our Father”), The Michigan Quarterly Review (“Joyride”), The Florida Review (“The Barge”), Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine (“Search Continues for Elderly Man”). “Melody,” was first published by Five Chapters under the title “The Amicable Divorce.” “If a Stranger Approaches You about Carrying a Foreign Object with You onto the Plane” was reprinted in The Pushcart Anthology. It also received the Cohen Award for Fiction from Ploughshares, 2007. “The Barge” was reprinted in The Pushcart Anthology, 2013. “Search Continues for Elderly Man” was reprinted in Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy 3.
LAURA KASISCHKE
has published eight collections of poetry and eight novels. This is her first story collection. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, several Pushcart Prizes, and the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for Space in Chains. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan, with her husband and son, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan.
Sarabande Books thanks you for the purchase of this book; we do hope you enjoy it! Founded in 1994 as an independent, nonprofit, literary press, Sarabande publishes poetry, short fiction, and literary nonfiction—genres increasingly neglected by commercial publishers. We are committed to producing beautiful, lasting editions that honor exceptional writing, and to keeping those books in print. If you’re interested in further reading, take a moment to browse our website, www.sarabandebooks.org. There you’ll find information about other titles; opportunities to contribute to the Sarabande mission; and an abundance of supporting materials including audio, video, a lively blog, and our Sarabande in Education program.
If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories Page 14
