Yet one sophomore named Trish has hung
a big muddled time-lapse
of an umbrella magnolia opening—a work
she has titled Self-portrait.
After a long stare, I begin to sense a blurred
sway of petals loosed by light.
I’m convinced I can see the first curious car
meandering on the freeway
of the bee—see dew’s crystal reflective scoops
apparitioning to vapor.
Does Trish not pose a treacly truth? Don’t we
all pour too much of our was
and will-be into now’s spilt thimble? Aren’t
we walking chronologies that
cannot keep our place? The adolescent face
of an octogenarian might be seen
within a prankish glance, or the too-young
bride on her wedding day might
well appear at the funeral upon the widow’s
face. Isn’t there a multitude
staring out from every mirrored gaze, from
yellowed photos trapped
inside their frames? To take it further, Trish,
consider: each particle of light
is from a separate age—photons born twenty
thousand, a hundred thousand,
a million years ago during fusion in the sun’s
dense core, all escaped its gravity
at once eight minutes past to just now together
penetrate this strip mall glass
and illuminate Self-portrait. So we’re all like you
Trish, in that our faces drift
in this polytemporal light, ancient simultaneity
of light, which we might
erroneously refer to as Now. If we could truly
time-lapse Now, Trish, would
that require each moment of every life—every
stumped toe and car crash, every
marriage and execution? In Now’s Self-portrait,
the octogenarian’s mother cries
out in labor just as his daughter is leaning over
the coffin to kiss his folded hands.
Now the age spots dappling his dead wrists are
being loaded onto the helixes that
made him. Now all the widow’s incarnations
turn light back into every eye
that ever glimpsed her as her hand grasps
the rounded doorknob—her
excarnation waiting one turn away. Or, flung
open now, Trish, the strict
modality of the hearse as we together look
gawkish past the windshield’s
wipers at the spectrum of visible us. We whose
genome holds the history
of a species and all our possibilities. We who
were once fire-flung stumps
of carbon cooked in a dying sun. We finites
neverending. We troves
of happening. We innumerable hives humming
with familiar ghosts. We holds.
We echoes. We harmonies. We everlasting Trish
adrift in the lacteal wash of stars.
About the Author
Originally from a place called Smokey Branch in East Tennessee, JEFF BAKER has earned degrees from Tennessee Tech and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A collection of his poems, Whoop and Shush, was selected by Dorianne Laux for the Idaho Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press in early 2015. His poems have recently appeared in Copper Nickel, Washington Square and Blackbird, and have been anthologized in Best New Poets 2010 and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee.
Keith Carter © 2013
Brooke Weeber © 2014
SMALL BOTTLES
* * *
THEO SCHELL-LAMBERT
I can’t stand flying in unfamiliar airplanes. Whenever I finally get used to an engine noise—the lactic French grumble of an Airbus A319, that high cajole of a 737—I find myself sitting on a taxiway in Fayetteville or Frankfort in some old MD-80, and I realize I haven’t flown McDonnell Douglas in years, and I’m about to spend the whole flight trying to figure out if the jet whine is supposed to sound like that or if it’s two troubling ticks too nasal.
I’m always calmed when I open the equipment specs in the seatback pocket—and they’re always there, if you check, addressed like postcards to men like me—and discover we’re running on a Rolls-Royce power plant. Not only does it feel like finery on the cheap, a little English alliteration to hang your hat on during a juddering jump from Dallas to Des Moines, but I also have a theory that you should always trust a luxury brand, even outside its area of expertise. They know how to cover their bases. They don’t want to do something to you that will embarrass them. I used to own Beretta jackets. I used to stick small bottles where the shotgun shells should go. I don’t own them anymore.
Lately I’ve been getting a tour of America’s aging fleets—her off-brand carriers, those hermaphroditic jets they send to hop you from one Midwestern city to the next. Canadairs and Bombardiers and Dash 8s. Embryonic Embraers. I have Saab stories. I know that sad feeling of stooping through the fuselage door and turning right to see you’ve pulled a 2-and-1, and you won’t be able to hold your head up till Rockford.
I used to fly in twin-aisles, even nationally. That’s when you know you’ve made it. When they give you room to breathe even on the short haul. I’d wing from Chicago to San Francisco in the bulkhead seat of a 767, four, six times a month. I’d earn enough miles after three months to score two frequent-flier seats to San Juan, earn enough revenue for the company that they’d send me there for free anyway, not to mention hand me the perk at a sales conference in Miami that was a vacation on its own. I’d forget that under-seat storage even existed. Sometimes, if the latitude was low and the schedule light, I’d bring my wife and daughter along, taking pleasure in the prime number on their tickets, the prime real estate out the window. Their view was the coastline, and my view was them. Looking back, I should have brought them along every time, flown them east, west, due north in coach.
The map of that old landscape languishes in my brain. Those farms and lakes and oceans that used to spread themselves out just for me. I don’t like the view anymore. A couple years ago I stopped looking out the window altogether. Now I make a point to score the window seat just so I can make sure that it’s snapped shut, that I don’t wind up next to some curious fool in 9A who insists on exposing our whole row to all that’s down there.
Back then I was still living in one of those proper cities, the kind of place you don’t wonder about when you see it from thirty thousand feet, orange and pulsing. You just know it’s someplace real. I had my wife and daughter, and I had a house made of quarried stone, and I had a base salary that skipped like a rock off my checking account and went straight into investment-grade securities, the product I was selling was that good. I could live for a year off the commissions I made in the first quarter. I could walk into a room with a blazing hotel-bar hangover and settle a deal on impatience alone.
In all those years, I don’t think I ever took the turn into the F terminal at my home airport, the sad ground-level corridor for the small carriers. I never had to find out how far the alphabet went. Now every week I wander through those ghettos, those Gs and Hs that don’t sound like airport letters at all. Watching twentysomething pilots and fiftysomething stewardesses flirt over a vending-machine dinner. Thinking how those Munchos and that Reese’s have to power us to Racine.
Half those terminals don’t even have a proper bar, which irks me from a standpoint of taste and services, but I have to admit it’s probably what’s keeping me aloft. I suppose I owe something to those bare lounges, all those sodden turkey sandwiches, those soiled chairs with the fixed armrests so that I can’t even lie down and dream my way out of there. They keep me right where I am.
It has not escaped my notice that back when I was in those proper fliers’ bars, with a heavy cut glass in my
hand, with something clearer than water in the glass, I was trying to depart a place that I should have been clinging to with both arms.
I sell a bad product now. That’s what they give you when you prove yourself not sufficiently appreciative of the good. They demote you from the modern virtual goods, the flyweight pills and ideas. You leave the lovely world of cloud storage and are walked over to a warehouse full of unwieldy items, improbable shapes. All at once, everything exists in hard copy again. There are actual objects, and the kicker is that you can misplace them. They are not backed up. You had forgotten all about that. You had forgotten that in the twenty-first century it was still possible to lose things.
My old stuff wasn’t physical, no sample case required. I wasn’t hawking pharmaceuticals, exactly, but it was a little like that. It might as well have been Prozac or Lipitor, the way I was hustling people with a vision of who they could be, a way to change without changing at all. It’s tempting now to fault those old easy sellers, the promises that came out of my mouth every afternoon. You can’t fly a 777 to Wichita Falls, and you can’t change without changing. Can you blame a man shilling that kind of magic for thinking he could have it all?
I asked my boss that very question, the day two years ago that he called me into his office. He seemed to think you could.
Those sweet easy sellers were a world away from this product that’s teetering at my feet right now. It always looks like it’s about to tip over, but that’s just how it looks. I have to haul it with me wherever I go, crammed inside a roller duffel that’s four inches in every direction too big for carry-on. I long ago gave up trying to stuff it into the sizer at check-in. If the bag were just one total foot smaller, my whole traveling life would be different. I wouldn’t burn away my tiny evenings next to claim carousels, making myself plead with representatives not to let it stay lost. Naturally these new bag fees come right out of my pocket. Sometimes I think I’m no longer a salesman at all, that the airlines have gotten together to run a sale on me.
Then I lug that heavy bag to the next hotel, and that same yellow smoking room I’m reclining in now, as I press a pack of ice against my face. I always hate the smell, but my first move is always lighting up a Marlboro Medium and producing more of it for the next traveler. It strokes my nerves. A “medium” cigarette, a real hedging of vices. And as soon as I’ve dashed out the butt, I do the thing I must, which is check the minifridge to make sure they’ve heeded my call and cleared it of tiny bottles. Just once they hadn’t, and even though I hadn’t sold a thing in weeks, I didn’t wait for the front desk to come pull them out. Maybe I just couldn’t stand to watch them do it. Immediately, one after the next, I slung each of the dozen whiskeys and vodkas and beloved gins from the eighth-floor window and watched them smash onto the frozen parking lot. Mixed a Long Island Iced Tea right there on the Iowa asphalt. Then I rode back downstairs and paid in cash for what I’d done.
But usually there is no big drama. Just that horribly empty refrigerator door. I wish they’d put something else in there, extra sodas or even food or candy or something, anything. Some drinkers’ ready pack of Fresca and stale crackers and ice-cold Skittles. On especially dire nights I’ve been known to put the little shampoos and conditioners in the door just so I don’t have to think about the missing shapes. Right now, just ten feet from my feet there are four fresh Avedas cooling. A little oil in my hair is a small price to pay. So much of what makes an airplane, a bottle, feel good is just the familiar dimensions.
At least I sleep better now, most of the time. The sleep takes years to come, but once it arrives, it carries me through one night. Not like in the flush days when I’d pass out with ease, swinging in a ménage à trois with my steady buzz and some new woman, then wake up four hours later, both partners long gone. I would lie there for long minutes staring at the phone, trying to figure out if it was ringing. In the beginning, I would hope desperately that it wasn’t, but it always was. A boss, a wife, a representative from the airline, curious why I’d missed the meeting, the T-ball game, the 11:00 a.m. to Houston. Even my flight times used to be so dignified, ending in those crisp zeros. The only watch I needed was the latest gleaming Movado I’d won in Miami, brazenly lacking the hour and minute markers. They give them to the best salesmen because the best salesmen don’t need to know.
Eventually, I got my wish. Eventually, the phone wasn’t ringing. When I got put on bad products, my first wake-up call was that my old watch was useless. I offered it to a retiring rep who’d bequeathed me his best lines, and he just laughed. “What’s the point of a watch that can’t tell time?”
They say you have to hit rock bottom, but in my experience enough hard scrapes of the landing gear will do. Until the day I actually felt the ground, I thought I wasn’t buying the farm. One thing less seasoned fliers don’t realize is that you can accumulate a crash landing over time.
On a Wednesday morning in Atlanta, the ringing telephone was real, and on a Monday afternoon in Memphis it was real, and at last, at 2:00 a.m. on a Saturday in a fake Art Deco tower in West Hollywood, it was as real as it gets. For two years, the phones in the better hotels just kept functioning, refused to be the Beefeater throbbing in my ears.
“What’s that sound?” my wife asked when she finally caught me in California, the way a traveler might ask about a bump or a rattle. There had been an odd thunk from somewhere deep in my hotel room.
“Hmm, what sound?” I said, the way a flight attendant might pretend that Boeing built it that way. I was looking at a fine woman I didn’t know and listening to a beautiful one I did.
“I heard a sound,” she said.
“Huh,” I slurred. “Well, I certainly wouldn’t worry about it.”
But here’s what they don’t tell you. Here’s why I really hate unfamiliar airplanes. Those sounds are real. The plane won’t always splinter right at that moment, but that engine noise, tuned to the wrong pitch? That thump you hear, that bump or clink or groan? Your instincts are correct. That is absolutely a problem. If you hear that sound again, you should begin to worry, and if you hear it a fifth time, something bad is about to happen, no matter how wide the flight attendant is smiling.
“Who’s with you?” she asked. The sound was back. There was no denying it this time: a definite thud in the background. We all heard it. And all at once I saw how this was about to go, was blasé in my jump seat no longer. I looked around and noticed even the veteran travelers starting to freak out, and I began thumping my ring against my tumbler, twirling the rocks and tonic dregs, for once desperate for the lesser sounds of glass and ice.
“It was the bottle, honey. I dropped a bottle. Yes, I’m drinking, and I’m sorry and . . .” And I realized at that exact moment, with a horrifying sensation like the ground coming up at my face, that I needed to say “I’m done.” But she beat me to it by two seconds.
“I’m done.”
And after that, after she said she was done, I figured for a while that I didn’t need to be. It seemed like one done could cover us both. Someone had to continue something.
My life now is charging: whether or not my phone, my laptop, my electric razor is full, and when it can become full again. The thing that really kills me at these junior terminals is the missing outlets. At the moment, I’ve got my cell phone sucking desperately at the wall, extracting all it can before I take it back into the wild. I’m trying to avoid getting it wet with melting ice. The last thing I can afford is to fry my best charger. The irony is, no one even uses hotel phones anymore.
The outlets are my lifelines—to my boss, to a fresh cheek at a 6:00 p.m. call, to the house that holds my daughter—and all day my head is tied up making calculations about battery drain rate and layover length and how quickly some terminal improvement in Columbus is liable to be proceeding. Everyone knows it’s harder to dig yourself out of a rut than to stay out of it in the first place, and part of that for me is all the bad product. But it’s also things like the outlets. How are you supposed to g
et anywhere if you never know where your next charge is coming from, if you’re competing with people in first-class lounges operating at full strength?
I got through to my daughter last night, for the first time in weeks. She has a knack for calling just after I’ve boarded, or finally fallen asleep a time zone east, or mismanaged a call to an unpromising lead and sapped my charge for the afternoon. She thinks she can never reach me, and I hate that that’s true, and that I simply don’t have the outlets to fix it. There’s another man in the stone house now, as there has every right to be. That of all things I can’t complain about. I even hope he will be pleasant and stay that way, will know how to snake a toilet and string a ukulele and make a delicious pesto. It will be easier for her that way—a life full of pesto. I could hear him in the background last night, chatting with her mother as they cooked dinner, probably tossing handful after handful of fresh pine nuts into the blender. Plugging that blender into my beautiful surge-protected power strips. Calling for more basil, more Parmesan, more of it all.
She wanted to know when I was going to visit, and I said I did too and she should ask her mother. We both breathed on the line, and I thought about how it’s been months since I’ve been in a terminal as shiny as the one in my old city. I thought about grounded outlets and grounded people, grounded flights and what a marvel it is that the ground used to move for me, right under my feet. Then my phone died.
In a way, the planes make it easier to explain. They’re so tragic, so accustomed to taking the heat. They so visibly can’t be involved in anything good. She rode along with me once, last summer, on a little 2–2 design you could practically hear Airbus rejecting. She was on her way to camp in the Ozarks, and the Ozarks are the kind of place I ply my trade now. I now work in the regions where my daughter goes to camp. I tried not to watch her eyes as we turned up the aisle. She frowned as I aimed us toward two tiny seats, not budging. “This is us?”
“This is us, honey.”
Day One, Year One: Best New Stories and Poems, 2014 Page 15
