by BRIAN HALL
She sips. “Well, now you have.”
He munches on his peanuts. The oil, like potassium, helps to calm him. Saskia gives him hers.
“I’m going to try to sleep,” she says. She pulls a neck pillow out of her carry-on bag, arranges her blanket, closes her eyes. After a minute she opens them again. “You don’t have any idea why Mette took off?”
“No.”
“She didn’t mention anything to you in the days or weeks right before? Frustrations with work?”
“Nothing.”
“Did she ever . . . Has she ever said anything about a boyfriend or girlfriend? Having one, wanting one, breaking up with one? Anything?”
“Not a thing.”
“And you never thought to ask?”
Once again, she sounds irritated. “No. It sounds like you didn’t, either.”
“But I thought about it.”
“As you irrefutably remarked a few minutes ago, I’m the way I am.”
“You’re right, my bad. I just thought . . . I don’t know, thinking of you two as buddies, again. That you’d have had more opportunity than me.”
“Perhaps I did. But unfortunately I wasn’t aware of it.” He ponders for a little while. “I’m getting the idea that we both thought the other knew more.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe we should communicate more.”
“Maybe.”
She closes her eyes. After a minute or two it sounds like she’s asleep. He remembers this about her, from all those years ago, her ease at falling asleep in chairs and other cramped spaces. Presumably her small size is an advantage. He’s seen big men sleeping in chairs, too, but he can never do it. He would rather not even try, so he gets up and sticks his head in the rear galley and asks the two stewardesses chatting there if he could have a cup of coffee. One of them complies with that gratifying enthusiasm that fools foolish men such as himself into imagining she might be willing to be his girlfriend.
He returns to his seat with his coffee and tries to read more of that extremely long novel, but brief bouts of turbulence keep distracting him with jolts of adrenaline. Eventually he gives up. He avoids looking at Saskia for a while, then looks at her. She seems deep asleep. He had a dream several years ago about two women he dated for a brief while in his twenties, first Stephanie, then Janice. In both cases they initiated the relationship, for which he was surprised and grateful, and also ended it, by which he was pained and puzzled. In reality they were fellow graduate students in astronomy, but in his dream they were musicians. Obviously, he had conflated them with all those girls he’d had crushes on during his adolescent summers at music camp. In his dream, Stephanie and Janice were performing the Kodály duo in a recital, Stephanie on violin, Janice on cello. Mark was in the audience listening, and he knew, in the dream, that both of them had been anxious beforehand about not doing well, but they played beautifully, and when he met them afterward they were happy. They were also tired, so he took them home to his apartment, where he kept a bed for each. He put on fresh sheets while the two women lolled sleepily in chairs. Then he carried each to her bed. Their eyes were half closed. He tucked them in and kissed them good night. Each had just enough energy to murmur thanks before falling asleep. Then he sat in one of the chairs and watched them both sleep and felt terribly alone.
Saskia told him once, during the years after their relationship when they occasionally communicated regarding Mette, that he often struck her as an extraterrestrial, examining human life with a curiosity that seemed benevolent, but also creepy. She joked that he’d become an astronomer because he was searching for his home planet. Far from being offended, he found the idea flattering. One strives as a scientist to be clear-eyed, not to be enmired in distorting human emotions. (That’s the word that always comes to him regarding emotions: “enmired.”) It depresses him when he observes teams of scientists competing with each other to be the first to make a discovery, prejudicially denigrating the work of the other team. It depresses him when he observes prominent scientists motivated by personal ambition, fame, awards—paltry things in comparison with establishing a single true fact about the nature of reality. Most of the more famous scientists, even today, are male, and it depresses him to contemplate how much human male achievement is sublimated sexual display, fanning the peacock tail, lining the nest with bright objects, gaining access to more females.
When he was still a graduate student he was part of a team that came to suspect it had discovered the first brown dwarf, causing the team leader to dance with visions of sugarplums. Suddenly there was paranoia about what the team at the University of California was doing, and eventually there was a media circus, and then scientists who were peripheral observers criticized the findings with points that were partly valid and partly envious, and Mark had a revelatory vision of this mysterious low-temperature gaseous body, indubitably out there, with no awareness that it needed a designation, simply itself, a marvelous fact, and on a rocky planet 103 light-years away a bunch of chimpanzees were jumping up and down and hitting one another on the head for the right to call it an M dwarf or an L dwarf so that they could get more bananas in the form of a bigger chair in one of the congresses of learned chimps, or five minutes on TV with an ooh-ooh-ah-ah-ing host who thought light-years were units of time.
He’s always been temperamentally attracted to unsexy subjects. He thought, in fact, that brown dwarfs were sufficiently unsexy, but he was wrong. He turned instead to astrometry, than which nothing could be unsexier. From there, it was natural to branch out into theories of galaxy formation, which depend on reams of accurate measurements of stellar mass and motion. The latter subject might, at rare intervals, generate a small public fuss, but except in cases where he has a responsibility to aid the professional prospects of a graduate student—ape behavior, but they are his trustful little chimps—he shares his data and his ideas freely. It may not have helped his professional standing, but it has certainly left more time for teaching.
Saskia sleeps on. It bothers him that he is attracted to small women. It’s probably a control thing. Not that he could control her. In fact, what he seems to miss most about the brief time they were together is the way she ran circles around him. A scientist needs his paradigms jostled. Of course she’s right that he likes to be an observer, to feel removed from the fray. When he played with his model train neighborhoods as a kid, gazing through the windows of a house, imagining the inhabitants washing dishes or reading in a chair, he found it gratifying that they were merely living their lives, while he was forming hypotheses about their lives. But the fact that smokers like cigarettes doesn’t mean it’s good for them.
He realized some time ago that he may be kind and patient with people, but that’s pretty much all he is. He realized that the reason he tends to give people what they want is not because he’s generous, but because he likes predictability. If you offer people what they want, they’re likely to take it. It’s a way of getting them out of your hair, so you can go back to eating at home alone and playing the piano for nobody. He and Saskia were trading favorite quotes a few minutes ago, and he would never admit it to her, but there’s a quote that for years has occasionally come “unbidden” (as they say) to his mind, and every time it does so he’s overcome with the feeling that it’s the most important advice anyone has ever offered about human relations. The reasons he wouldn’t admit it to her are, first, that it seems so sentimental, and second, that it’s so comically, or maybe sadly, at odds with the way he’s lived his life, or anyway with the outward appearance of the way he’s lived his life. He doesn’t know the origin of the quote, and of course he could google it, but he doesn’t want to know, because it’s probably from a Coke commercial, or some Disney cartoon song sung by simpering forest animals. The quote is, “Shower the people you love with love.”
Saskia sleeps on.
He wonders if he’s ever made it clear to Mette how m
uch she means to him. He wonders if Saskia had any idea how upset he was when she left him. (Is “left” the right word? It was so brief.) On the other hand, who would want a person to stay with them solely because the person knew they would be miserable otherwise? That’s manipulation. Saskia said her father was manipulative. In the past couple of hours Mark has been feeling more and more anxious. It’s partly the flight, but also, suddenly, he’s afraid for Mette. It’s maddening that he has no way to assess the validity of his fear, since he knows nothing. He wonders if it’s his own fault that he knows nothing.
He breathes deeply for several minutes, then takes refuge in the book again. Dawn comes early, but no one raises the shades on their windows because many passengers are still sleeping. He returns to the galley to ask about another cup of coffee and is assured it’s no trouble by the same woman as before, who he could swear is on the verge of giving him her telephone number. Returns to his seat, reads. The book makes him think of Saskia’s claim, or charge, that he and Mette are alike. He wonders whether Mette, like himself, might benefit from someone attempting to coax her out of a predilection for solitude that serves her well in some ways but badly in others. He wonders whether, during all these years in which he has been pleasing himself in his email exchanges with her, he has been failing her.
Daylight glows around the shades, which remain lowered, while Saskia and most of the other passengers sleep on. Some dozen young people watch their first movie of the day. Eventually stewards and stewardesses begin to move along the aisles, then one of them gets on the PA system and announces the imminence of breakfast. A few shades are raised, which brightens the cabin, which wakes more people who raise their shades, and suddenly it’s a bright new day, in fact dazzling, thanks to the wondrously reliable 4.6-billion-year-old G-type main-sequence star rising in the southeast of the nitrogen-blue sky and the brilliant carpet of greenhouse-worsening but—on the plus side—albedo-enhancing white clouds below. Mark’s wristwatch says 4:00 a.m. Local time is nine. They will land in two hours, or crash in approximately one hundred minutes. (Most airplane accidents occur on approach.)
Saskia wakes and stretches.
“Did you sleep well?” he asks.
“Mm,” she murmurs drowsily. Another thing he remembers about her—her difficulty waking. On each of the five mornings she woke in his house he brought her coffee in bed, then worked downstairs for an hour before she appeared. She apologizes for making him get up, goes to the lavatory. When she returns to her seat she still seems stunned.
“They’ve just started serving breakfast,” he says.
“Mm.” She yawns. Then she says, “Thomas had a nervous breakdown. When I was four. Tried to kill himself. Part of me thinks I should be compassionate, but another part thinks the whole thing was a performance. He’s one of these charismatic types who’s been able to seduce people easily all his life. Where’d you get that coffee?”
“From the galley. Do you want me to get you a cup?”
“Nah, they’re busy with breakfast, I’ll wait. Anyway, when I spent a summer with him when I was thirteen, I saw how destructive he was. I haven’t seen him for thirty years. I get a note from him every now and then, and I answer because I don’t want there to be any mystery or drama, I send him these brief replies, I’m fine, etc. I’ve felt ever since I was thirteen that every moment I think about him is a moment that he wins. He certainly doesn’t waste any time thinking about me.”
As usual, Mark can think of nothing helpful to say. He wishes she would go on. After a few seconds he says, “Since he’s Danish, how did he end up in America?”
“Long story. He grew up in some sandy wasteland in North Jutland, an only child, his father and grandfather were both ministers in this little parish. Or anyway, that’s what he told me once, but a charming thing about him is that he loves to make shit up. It’s part of the power thing—the less you know about him. He said he met my mother in India and that’s probably true, my mother always said the same thing, then they came to upstate New York and he enthroned himself as guru on that old property I was living on when you and I met. Then he got restless and pretended he wanted to depart this mortal realm but probably he just wanted to run away from humdrum obligations. So when he got out of the hospital he left the US, seems to have traveled for a while, he might have done some eco-activism, when I met him again at thirteen he was trying to prevent a river in Norway from being dammed. When everyone else wouldn’t do exactly what he wanted he took his bat and ball and left that game, too. Anyway, as far as I know he’s been back in Denmark now for the last twenty years. His address is some island that’s so small you only have to put his name and the island on the envelope. He wrote a few years ago that he was living in an old windmill he was repairing, which sounds so exactly like him, or like the image he’s always liked to project, I’ve wondered if it’s bullshit. He probably wants everyone to picture him sitting on top of it like a bearded holy man in a New Yorker cartoon. I think he wishes he were a trickster god, like Loki or Coyote. You know, God the Liar—what would that be, Deus Mendax, Deus Mentiens? Anyway, I’d bet anything he’s got a Border Collie named Lila. All his life he’s had a succession of dogs, all Border Collies, all named Lila. It’s a way of making the dog timeless, making himself timeless. Narcissists live forever because they’re convinced the whole cosmos ends when they die. He’s probably about seventy by now, but he’ll look fifty, max, you heard it here first. I’m kind of mad at myself that I gave Mette a Danish name, but I’ve always known the language a little, I can read simple stuff, I’ve always liked the sound of it. I should have given her the middle name Fuckthomas just so there’d be no misunderstanding. If you sound it out, it’s actually got a pretty nice rhythm to it, Mette Fuckthomas White. Anyway, guess what? He’s winning.”
Mark’s head is swimming. She has always done this to him.
The breakfast cart is approaching. “Earlier they said we had a choice of mushroom and cheese omelet, or pancakes and blueberries.”
“Anything, as long as I get coffee. I’m not hungry. What are you getting?”
“The omelet.”
“If I don’t eat mine, which would you rather have?”
“Another omelet.”
“I’ll get that. I don’t know how men eat so much.”
“Of course you do, we’re bigger.”
“You’re right, I was being rhetorical. Busted!”
The stewardess is by his elbow, holding breakfast boxes as neat and aseptic as astronaut food. “Sir?”
“Two omelets, please.”
“I’m sorry, I can only give you one, as we have limited supplies.”
“He means one for me and one for him,” Saskia says. “Coffee?”
“Coming in a minute.” The cart lurches into the rear galley.
Mark opens his plastic box, removes the plastic utensils from their plastic bag. Pulls back the plastic film covering the pat of butter, pries the plastic lid off the plastic tub of strawberry jam. Such impressive amounts of trash. Maybe the plane should just drop its quota directly into the ocean while they’re flying over it. Save on fossil fuels powering the barges.
Coffee arrives at last. Mark eats, Saskia sips. Mark eats most of Saskia’s food.
“Don’t forget to drink all your buttermilk,” she says.
“They have buttermilk?”
“Sorry, dumb joke. Never mind.”
In the quiet minutes after eating, it occurs to Mark that Saskia “shared” with him, and maybe this is the time for him to “share” back. He remembers regretting, years ago, that there were certain personal things he’d never told her during the brief time they were together. He thinks about having, maybe, failed Mette. He looks down at the archeological ruins of his breakfast and says, “When my mother became demented after my father died, there were a few set phrases she would say repeatedly. For example, when she first came downstairs each m
orning she would say, ‘Mark, I’m afraid the TV isn’t working.’ I never could figure out whether she was actually feeling anxiety, or even thinking about the TV, or whether the sentence was just a verbal tic elicited by her arrival in the living room. She’d always been an angry person. She became sweeter as she lost cognitive ability, but there were some things that would set her off. She wanted to watch the same movies over and over. One of them was a TV adaptation of a Dick Francis mystery called Blood Sport. A valuable racehorse is stolen, and the detective hero teams up with an insurance investigator who I think is supposed to be a comic character—he’s heavy-set, slow-moving, talkative at the wrong moments, always sloppily eating something. Anyway, there’s a scene toward the end where the detective and the insurance guy are racing down the road in a car, tailing some bad guys. The detective is driving, and the clock is running out before something bad happens, and the insurance guy starts into one of his longwinded objections to the hero’s plan, and right at this moment, every time, my mother would pop forward on the couch and yell, ‘Why don’t you shut up, you fat shit!’ Then she’d settle back and watch the rest of the scene with perfect equanimity.”
Mark shifts his gaze to the ceiling. “Of course she was really yelling at my father, who by that point had been dead for years. Both my mother and my father had these rigidities, these . . . you could call them I guess frozen attitudes toward each other. Or maybe frozen emotions. In later years when either one of them complained to me about the other, they would always bring up the same anecdote to justify their indignation. My mother complained about some Saturday an eon ago when Susan was little and my mother wanted some free time and she asked my father if he’d look after her for the afternoon and he got angry and said he worked hard all week and she never asked him again because he was so angry it almost frightened her. She always told it the same way, in the same words. For his part, my father would talk about the time when my mother said he was a terrible father because he called Susan a whore, when all he meant to say was that she was wearing too much makeup, etcetera etcetera. They repeated these grievances over and over to me, but as far as I could tell they never said them to each other. They seemed incapable of listening to each other, of reformulating the tiniest detail of their outraged memories.”
