by BRIAN HALL
“You remember that?”
“I’m an actor. I have a good memory for scenes.”
The plane begins its long trundle toward the runway, occasionally thumping in a worrisome manner. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Norwegian Air Flight 187—” Mark continues to look as well as he can out the window, consciously appreciating, in an attempt to allay his anxiety, the extraordinarily pretty geometry of the intersecting lines of different colored ground lights. It always reminds him of flights he was taken on out of Boston’s Logan Airport when he was little, to visit his grandmother in Florida. He was with his mother and Susan, and felt completely safe. They always let him have the window seat. It feels very strange to be the only person from his family who is still alive.
Now they are turning onto the runway. The brilliant yellow lines seem to extend for miles. The plane pauses, contemplating for a moment—Mark always imagines—its mortality. Then the engine noise rises to a reckless moan, the acceleration begins. Mark breathes. He never can quite believe the Bernoulli effect will be strong enough to lift this huge hunk of metal off the ground. But the nose lifts, the vector of motion curves upward, the city lights fall away. By god, they seem to be cheating the laws of physics once again.
The baby is not crying. Since the ascent is so fast, maybe the crew is careful to keep the cabin pressure steady for the first few minutes. He and Saskia have not flown together before, so he thinks it better to admit it: “I don’t like flying.”
“No kidding.”
“You can tell?”
“Something about the Lamaze breathing and the convulsive grip on the armrest.”
“It’s ridiculous, airplanes are statistically the safest form of travel.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“I get more nervous when there’s turbulence, even though pilots say turbulence poses little risk.”
“Maybe it’s a control thing. I remember my driving made you nervous.”
“Did it?”
“Come on. You tried to hide it.”
Mark has to think for a moment. “It had nothing to do with your skill.”
“Thank you, that’s a given.”
“I guess I don’t like being a passenger in anyone’s car.”
“Like I said, a control thing. You should get a pilot’s license, then you can fly wherever you want.”
Mark has nothing intelligent to say to this.
“It could also be a conditioned response,” she goes on. “When I walk alone down a dark street in the city, I think of similar scenes in movies. They don’t bother to film those scenes unless some mugger is about to appear, so naturally I think of muggers. It’s even more true for scenes on airplanes. They’re a bitch to film, so pretty much 100 percent of the time, if there’s turbulence, one character will get nervous and the other character will reassuringly say that turbulence is nothing to worry about, and right after that the plane falls out of the sky.”
“That’s an interesting point. I don’t watch many movies anymore, though.”
“Back to theory one, you’re a control freak.”
“. . . ”
“I’m kidding.”
“No, I am a control freak.” A few seconds go by. He goes on, “I was walking around campus a few weeks ago, and I stopped to look at the construction some company was doing on the new computer sciences building. It was evening, all the workers had gone home. They’d been installing glass panels for the lobby, eight feet by four, each one must have weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. Flawless surfaces, edges true to probably less than half a millimeter, double paned, high insulation and reflectivity indices. In each corner were set these delicate mounts of brushed steel secured with steel cylinders in black rubber collars, and the mounts interlocked so that each glass panel could be attached directly to its neighbor. I thought of all the research in materials science, all the advances in precision engineering that went into creating those beautiful objects. Then I noticed the assembly directions in the lower right-hand corners of each pane, these little labels that hadn’t been removed yet. They were on the outside, and each label said, ‘Install this side in.’ That’s the sort of thing that comes to my mind whenever I fly.”
He gazes down the length of the cabin. He can see over all the other heads. The baby is out of sight, maybe asleep in its mother’s lap. “Or I think about the Mars Climate Orbiter. On any interplanetary trajectory, tiny disruptive forces such as solar wind need to be corrected for. Lockheed calculated the forces and reported them to JPL, which sent the correction commands. But Lockheed calculated the forces in English units, while JPL thought they were in metric units. So JPL was overcorrecting. After a trip of 670 million km, the orbiter was only about 100 km off course, but that was enough to cause total failure. It either burned up in the atmosphere or bounced off it and re-entered heliocentric space. Worse, it turned out later that two different JPL navigators had noticed earlier that something was off with the trajectory, but their warnings were ignored because they didn’t fill out the right form to submit to the oversight committee.”
“Maybe we should change the subject,” she says.
“I’m going on too long, aren’t I? I’m sorry.”
“It’s not that, I just think you’re making yourself more nervous.”
“Maybe.” And there’s the Genesis probe, whose chute failed to open because a gravity switch had been mounted upside down— “Um . . .” He racks his brain. He can see a dozen lit screens in the seat backs in front of him, movie scenes set along dark city streets or on bucking airplanes, hideous and hysterical music videos, the surprisingly crude graphics of their own plane crawling up the coast toward Nova Scotia. All he can think of to say is, “Airlines today offer quite a number of viewing choices.”
She says, “Not too long ago airplanes were one of the last places you still saw people reading books. There, and on the subway. In New York City, anyway. But even there you don’t see it much anymore, except for women reading Elena Ferrante.”
“Who?”
She makes a sound. Not really a snort, what might one call it? “You’re a straight male, you don’t read fiction.”
Mark vaguely remembers an argument they had about this once. Something painful. He says, “It’s true I haven’t read much fiction for a long time. But a few weeks ago I was clearing out my mother’s house and I saw all the mysteries she read in her last years, and I saw also the novels my father left behind, Faulkner and C. P. Snow and Le Carré. I even found in the attic some old science fiction paperbacks I’d read when I was a teenager. I realized I did kind of miss reading fiction. I’m reading something right now, something Mette suggested, a very long novel called Infinite Jest. Have you heard of it?”
“Um, yeah.”
“The author clearly has a background in math and science. He doesn’t quite understand how the Brocken spectre phenomenon works, I used to be intolerant of mistakes like that, but really you can only know so much. For example, he knows much more about pharmacology than I do. I was thinking of writing to him about Brocken spectres and suggesting an emendation, in case there’s another edition.”
“He’s dead.”
“Oh. That’s too bad.”
“He committed suicide.”
Mark thinks about that for a few seconds. “Mette said when she recommended the book to me that when she was depressed he was the only writer who seemed to understand her.”
“Mette told you she was depressed?”
“Not exactly. She said she had been depressed.”
“When was this?”
“Two, three months ago? She’s mentioned being down a couple of times in the past couple of years.”
“And you just let it go?”
“. . . I don’t know what you mean.”
“You didn’t pursue it?”
“It just sounds like somethin
g she feels now and then.”
“Why didn’t you tell me anything about this?”
“It didn’t occur to me that you didn’t already know. You talk to her all the time.”
“Depression is serious!”
“You don’t need to tell me that. My father was depressed for the last twenty years of his life. The way Mette refers to it, it sounds less severe than what my father had.”
“And you never connected this with her running off?”
“Of course it occurred to me as one possibility, among several. As I said, I thought you already knew she was occasionally depressed. The world is full of depressed people. Half of my students are on antidepressants.”
“Jesus Christ.” She seems to be angry.
“I’m sorry. I really am. I assumed you would know more about this than I did. You never mentioned anything in our recent phone calls about depression or suicide.”
“Oh my god, you’re impossible!”
Mark has already apologized, and meant it, so he’s not sure what else he can do. He remembers reading a compelling argument that penitence is genuine only when there is a sincere will to change, so after a moment he says, “I promise, next time something like this comes up, I won’t assume you already know potentially relevant facts.”
She is looking away from him. She is still angry. Mark feels bad. Now that she has pointed it out, it does seem foolish, perhaps even culpable, that he didn’t spend more time determining what each of them knew. Three or four minutes go by, during which a steward announces they’ll be coming down the cabin with their complimentary beverage service. Eventually, Saskia says, “Partly, I’m upset because it bugs the shit out of me that Mette tells you things she doesn’t tell me.”
“There must be many things she tells you that she doesn’t tell me.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
Mark ponders this for a while. Then he says, “Maybe it’s easier to say things to the parent you don’t know as well. Like what they say about people pouring out their problems to the bartender.”
“So she pours out her problems to you?”
“Well, no. We have fun doing puzzles together. This occasional mention of being down in spirits is the only thing I can think of.”
“She has fun with you.”
“Sure.”
There’s a long silence. Since they are seated in the back row, the beverage cart is a long way off.
“I’ve never understood her,” she says.
“That’s too imprecise to mean anything.”
She makes an exasperated sound. “The very fact you say that proves my point. It’s what she would say. But I know exactly what I mean.”
There’s a server at both ends of the beverage cart, and the cart blocks one row. After thinking about it for a second, Mark sees that in order to serve everyone, the servers need to alternate between advancing one row and three rows.
“Did I ever tell you I ran away from home once?” she asks.
“No.”
“I was thirteen. I knew I couldn’t hurt my father, so I was trying to hurt my mother. This thing with Mette feels like karmic payback. Except I don’t think my mother worried about me much.”
Mark has an insight, which he tries to formulate. “And so . . . perhaps . . . I haven’t seemed to you in these past few days to be worried enough, either. Like your mother, maybe?”
“Well of course, I told you as much. Although you’re nothing like my mother, believe me.”
“But I have been worried. I sent Mette that text.”
“I know, I know. You’re the way you are, Mette’s the way she is.”
Mark can’t argue with that. He doesn’t want to accidentally make things worse, so he doesn’t say this, or anything else, he just watches the beverage cart inch closer. He always gets tomato juice, since the potassium helps to calm his nerves.
“I’ve been working on this Joan of Arc play,” she says.
“You mentioned that a couple of years ago. You’re still working on it?”
“Writing takes a long time.”
“I wasn’t implying—”
“Or it does me, anyway.”
“I didn’t—”
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m writing it just to understand Mette better.”
“I still don’t quite know what you’re referring to.”
“She doesn’t speak to me! Hardly ever!”
“You mean, she’s mad at you?”
“No. Or . . . I don’t know. That’s the problem—I don’t know what the problem is. I don’t even know if there is a problem. I just get this idea that you and she are buddies and I’m excluded, and it . . . it’s embarrassing to put it into words, it sounds like middle school . . . but I’m her mother, she’s spent all her life with me and yet . . . You know, in a way, she’s all I really have. Jesus, that sounds so melodramatic . . . Shit! Never mind, never mind.”
Is she upset? Her face is turned away. Mark is dumbfounded. “I . . . She . . . I’m sure she . . .” All sorts of platitudes come to mind, but no one ever wants platitudes, do they? Mark hates it when people say I’m sure everything will be fine, when they have no way of knowing. It’s insulting to a person’s intelligence to think they will be comforted by empty words. The fact is, he doesn’t really know anything about Saskia’s relationship with Mette.
The beverage cart is still five rows away. Looking past it, Mark sees again all those lit screens and thinks about his students, how he and his colleagues have been forced to reduce class workload because students resolutely refuse to do more than a certain piddling amount, which shrinks annually. He sometimes wonders if, along with resource depletion and environmental degradation, another reason intelligent civilizations never spread to other star systems is that, as the fruits of technology proliferate, intelligent creatures prefer comfort and entertainment to the hard challenge of scientific advancement or the risk of exploration. Maybe intelligent civilizations are common in the Milky Way, but we never hear from any of them because everyone’s home watching movies. And who’s to say that’s unfortunate? Adopting a cosmic perspective is all about shedding privileged points of view. He’s a scientist, so of course he values the advancement of science. Maybe creatures that sit in recliners and watch movies are less likely to kill one another and blow up their planet.
“His ways are not our ways,” she says.
She has turned back toward him. Her face is blank. Or rather, he can’t read it. “What’s that?”
“It’s something Joan of Arc said at her trial. Referring to God, of course.”
“Ah.”
“I say that to myself sometimes when I realize I’m inflating balloons and hanging streamers for a pity party.”
“Ah.”
“Shaw fucked it up in his play, he changed it to ‘His ways are not your ways’—Joan talking to her judges. Shaw turned it into typical Shavian lecturing and self-righteousness, when the original is more about Joan accepting her fate.”
“So . . . is that a little like saying, ‘You’re the way you are’?”
“Yeah, I guess. You know those mugs that say ‘It is what it is’? I kind of hate them because the phrase has been adopted as corporate-seminar-speak, but like a lot of facile clichés there’s a profound truth hidden there if you can just see it fresh. You know, pretend you’ve never thought of it before.”
“There’s a quote I’ve always liked,” Mark says, “I think it’s from Confucius. ‘Wherever you go, go there with all your heart.’”
“Yeah, that’s a good example. It actually means everything, if you can just hear it like a new idea.”
“It’s a good principle for scientists.”
“It’s similar to that Coen brothers line you mentioned, ‘Just look at that parking lot.’ Holding on to an idea of wonder.”
; “Which is what science is all about.”
“I didn’t know you believed in the heart, though.”
“It’s just an expression. It could easily be ‘go there with all your attention.’”
“Don’t you think ‘heart’ means more than that?”
“Well . . . maybe. Attention plus moral engagement. Plus intuition, which is probably related to empathy. All of that makes good science.”
“Moral engagement?”
“Of course. All decent scientists struggle with the implications of their discoveries, whether it involves human biology or the military, or whatever. My father uprooted my mother and sister and left a secure position at RAND, he crossed the country to get away from nuclear weapons. Even though he loved the science. He never found atmospheric research to be as interesting. I think it’s one of the things that made him depressed in his later years. What people don’t understand is that, even if scientists dread the misuse of what they discover, they know that what is discoverable will be discovered, by someone. The whole nature of science—its openness, its explicable structure—means there’s a strong likelihood that if you can see a way forward in a certain area of knowledge, other scientists can see it also.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.”
“While we’re talking about quotes, there’s one my father liked, he used to say it to me all the time, it’s actually from some fantasy novel, I think, about some society on another planet. One of the characters explains to a visitor, ‘There’s a dreadful law here, that if anyone asks for machinery they have to have it and keep on using it.’ Of course my father was thinking of nuclear weapons. I guess anyone would. I always remember the quote when I’m on airplanes.”
“It makes me think of automobiles. Maybe because I’m a New Yorker.”
“And robocalls. And smartphones.”
“And paperless voting machines.”
“And traffic lights. Half of the intersections in Ithaca would work more efficiently with four-way stop signs.”
The beverage cart has arrived. Mark gets his tomato juice, Saskia asks for hot water. “I’ve never seen that before,” he says.
