Dear American Airlines

by Jonathan Miles

  They've closed the gate terminal—my TSA angel, alas, has abandoned me, has escaped to his mattress at home—so it looks as if this will have to be it for me tonight. My final resting place, hahahahaha

  ***

  Two A.M., yes. Not quite so lonesome as three A.M., the bittersweet hour that inspired so many blues songs, but near enough. Even in this overlit airport, beneath your radiant blue A's, dear American Airlines, one can't fully escape the seeping darkness. It's like black oil, flowing in slowly beneath the automatic doors. When the doors slide open the blue glow recoils ... oh for chrissakes dear American Airlines, are you still reading this? Well of course you're still reading this if you're reading this—this sentence, I mean. It's just confounding and somehow heartening, at this point, to imagine why. Who are you? You there, alone, dutifully turning these pages of mine, somewhere ... yes, you. I presume you're in Fort Worth—that's where this letter is addressed—and, the more I think about it, probably tucked into a cubicle inside a sleek, low building on the outer edges of the corporate compound. One of those anonymous office-park buildings in which the sole splash of color is provided by the lobby Coke machine. Reading this is your job; for the moment, then, I am your job. How odd. I have my own caseworker in Texas! Howdy padnah.

  I suspect you're young, or youngish; sifting through the corporate slushpile is the stuff of an entry-level gig, of the ladder's lower rungs. I imagine you think of your life that way, too: as a ladder which you've just begun to climb. Allow me to take a wild stab, with apologies up front for any errant shots. You're a native Texan, or at most an Oklahoman, Fort Worth's radius of allure being somewhat limited. As a corporate citizen, I suspect you're a traditionalist, a casual God-fearer, perhaps the recent graduate of one of Texas's fine universities. Maybe the University of Dallas (I did a reading there once), or perhaps Midwestern State—a no-nonsense school, a sensible campus, one of those hatcheries for the big corporate pools. Yet you like the concrete virtues of working for a large corporation. The transparency of your future, the way it can be quantified, is a comfort to you. To be frank I envy you: You aren't victimized by your daydreams. I don't mean this condescendingly, mind you. Your bootstraps are sturdy, you've got a plan. Your feet are planted firmly on the ground. You've got the world tight by its tail, etc.

  And yet here you are—what time is it there, what day?—reading this. When you tore open the envelope and slid out this crazyass sheaf of paper your jaw must have dropped and you must have wheeled your office chair to the edge of your cubicle divider, holding these pages in one hand as if weighing them and saying to your neighbor in the adjacent cubicle, "We've got a record-breaker." Maybe you said a "nutcase"—it's okay. Maybe even a reference to Jack Nicholson in The Shining, with his hundreds of pages of the same droning sentence. That one's out of line but, awright, I get the impulse. There was probably much astonished laughter traded between the two of you, and maybe you even showed this letter to your manager who wagged his head with grim amusement. Yet still you're reading. You could've stopped a long time ago. Maybe your manager even ordered you to stop. "Hey, (your name here)," he might've said. "Enough with the nutcase already." It's not as if you require further argument to fulfill my refund request. In your mind you long ago awarded me that check, solely on the basis of my Bunyanesque efforts. (Or is it only a voucher for a free trip that you're permitted to grant? In that case, friend, I urge you not to bother.) Let's not forget there are other, more crisp letters for you to read, to sort through, to respond to. Dear_, goes your daily mantra, Thank you for your recent letter to American Airlines. Thank you for your recent letter to American Airlines. So many letters, so many judgments, so many names instantly forgotten if indeed they ever penetrated your brain. Plus so much else to do in life, oh the hours can't contain it! Your mother is calling. Your oil needs changing. Your aunt's birthday is Saturday. The folks at work want to meet up at T.G.I. Friday's again—hey, why not, they're a great crew. Your college pals are emailing—forwarded jokes and inspirational messages, you can't keep up. Yet still you're with me—for reasons known only to you, you're listening.

  What a weird & warm feeling that suddenly swells me with! Like finally putting a face to God—or at least God's secretary. I can't help thinking of that scene in Karol Szczepanski's novel The Drummer of Gnojno—alas, never translated into English—in which the hero is out on the street hurling mad, foamy-mouthed curses at the stained-glass window of the church (which is not so unlike, come to think of it, your giant blue logo above me) when the elderly pastor emerges and, after hobbling down the steps of the entrance with his cane, asks the hero to please direct his curses at him instead. The hero begins, haltingly, but when he looks into the priest's eyes he collapses weeping into his arms and says over and over again that he's sorry. It is so much easier, after all, to love or hate an idea. Perhaps, then, I should apologize for my prior hectoring & harangues—for my own mad, foamy-mouthed curses. When I called you a miserable fuck, understand that I meant it collectively, not personally. Obviously it wasn't you who threw the track-switch on my life or even on my current itinerary. No, young friend, I owe you better. You've heard me out this far so it's time for me to start coming clean. I'm afraid I've been dressing the corpse as always. There's much I haven't told you.

  ***

  Not so fast. A fella needs to smoke, okay? My doctor says otherwise but he's paid to say that. During my last visit he had me blow into a plastic tube fitted with a Ping-Pong ball I was supposed to raise by exhaling into the tube. I suspect it was rigged. That Ping-Pong ball struck me as curiously heavy. Perhaps a golfball in clever disguise? "You have the lungs of a 150-year-old man," he said, har-de-har. (I was tempted, in response, to quote a line from Bukowski—"It's so easy to die long before the / fact of it"—but reconsidered. Quoting poetry is the quickest route to a blank stare, unless you're in the sack with a lady in which case it's a dangerous toss-up. For example, I once heavy-breathed these lines of Lorca's (per Merwin's excellent translation) to Stella: "Your belly is a battle of roots / your lips are a blurred dawn. / Under the tepid roses of the bed / the dead moan, waiting their turn." Her unexpected reaction was to shove me off of her and accuse me of conjuring her gang-rape by skeletons. And she was a poet! Or had been anyway. To assure her of the lines' proper romantic context I had to scurry off to locate the poem in its entirety. "To see you naked is to remember the earth," I read aloud to her, "the smooth earth, swept clean of horses." Because Stella was a horse-lover, these lines tanked as well.) Instead of quoting Buk to the doctor, I cheerily said thank you though he obviously hadn't meant the 150-year-old-man crack as a compliment. Sawbones scowled at me which I found unsavory since, really, I'd only matched him jest for jest. Apparently it's fair to make funny only about bodies you don't inhabit.

  When I got home I bragged to Miss Willa and Aneta that the doctor had pronounced my lungs "antebellum" which went straight over Aneta's head but sparked a crispy Post-it note from my mother: NOT FUNNY. Of course we shouldn't discount the possibility that my impious reference to days in Dixie "not forgotten" was what caused her to bristle, rather than my sinking physical state. Her emotional allegiance to the Old South is infinite. If she takes any pleasure from living in New York, it is in having her prejudices about Yankees certified with every fair-weather outing. Once she saw two tattooed lesbians—hardcore dyke-types, from Aneta's description—passionately making out outside a Bleecker Street barroom at noon. It so disgusted and disturbed her—the in-public element of it, I mean, the lack of decorum; Miss Willa is not entirely a ninny—that she went on about it for days, weeks. So I've naturally kept the livelier details of Speck's wedding from her. WHAT KIND OF NAME IS SYLVANA? she Post-it-asked. "Polish," I replied, and she gasped and rolled her eyes before remembering our dear Aneta's national extraction. Poor Miss Willa. Hounded by Poles all her life.

  Speaking of Poles: I wrote earlier that my father's death was oddly unemotional for me, a statement that might benefit from clarification. To be
frank it seemed like such a relief for him. I sometimes wonder—less now than I used to—how he ever reconciled the arc of his life, how he ever sketched out that self-narrative in his head. The there-to-here story you mull while lying awake in bed at three A.M. watching a spider traverse the ceiling. Or while immobilized at some godforsaken airport. Just imagine, though, working as an exterminator after surviving Dachau, making & disposing of corpses from nine to five. Flipping the switch on the gas, that sort of thing. What an unholy struggle it must have been to keep from connecting the dots—little wonder he sneaked his victims away to the docks. And after losing everything, let's not forget: his country, his family, his faith, more or less in that order. How high his hopes must have been—must have needed to have been—for America. Imagine that brass band welcoming him to shore: I want to beeeee in dat numbaaah. What did he think he would find there—here? What must his dreams have looked like? But then it's possible, isn't it, that he had none. Merely blank hope, an empty canister to be filled with the secondhand dreams of a new and scarless country. The dream we call American: a house, a wife, children, an immaculate green lawn, those legions of darker-skinned people whose worse-off situation exists to comfort us about our own. (One of my father's ironies was his adopted racial attitudes—he tossed the word NEE-gar around like doubloons from a parade float and was a party-line seg voter. History, even scalding personal history, doesn't always transmit the expected lessons. Memory and meaning, I've found, often book separate rooms in the brain.)

  But let's not fool ourselves that the American Dream sufficed. No, you didn't see him at night, not watching the television but rather looking through it. I'd try to play catch with him and in his distraction the ball would bean him in the chest. Sometimes in the early morning—like a farmer he always woke at five A.M. — I would find him alone at the breakfast table engaged in what looked like deep prayer but wasn't. Back when I was an altar boy, and weighing a future as a priest as ten-year-old Catholic boys in New Orleans often did, my mother disclosed to me that my church-shirking father, "of all people," had been studying for the priesthood when "the war started." What a shocker, since my father's favorite English word was goddamnit. When I quizzed him about this he waved me away, offering only this: "I had a date with God but He never showed up." ("Henry!" my mother seethed, pushing me from the room. "Don't you dare say things like that to him.") That line whirled back to me five years later, after his death—specifically, when my mother and I were sitting in the funeral director's office, them trying to decide what to inscribe on the tombstone. It seemed like a fitting epitaph but I kept this opinion to myself. That my first reaction upon seeing him in the coffin that day—dressed in a suit he'd never worn, a rosary curled around fingers so begrimed the makeup couldn't mask it—was a proud, tender smile, rather than tears, caused me hot grief & guilt for years thereafter. But I couldn't help myself—all I could think was that he'd gotten out. Go, Dad, go. At the wake one of my father's coworkers from the import shop, a beefy Cajun guy with forearms like Popeye the cartoon sailorman, put a hand on my shoulder and said, "Your dad's in a better place, kid." The standard rap. With a nod I replied that yes, I knew it, thank you. But I doubt we had the same place in mind. He was thinking entrance, I was thinking exit. It's the same door but the sign makes all the difference.

  But back to the smoking: For the first time since my absurd arrival here, I found myself alone on the sidewalk. Just me and the pavement and my little orange-nubbed cigarette and a red trash barrel onto which a happy sign is pasted: "We're glad you're here," signed by Mayor Richard Daley and endorsed by the Walgreens corporation. I was standing by the trash barrel, half-drowning in old thoughts á la those above, when the automatic doors behind me hissed open, startling the hell out of me. I turned to see who it was—hoping for company, I suppose; hoping for something—but no one was there. A glitch. When the doors closed, I turned back to resume smoking until the doors slid open and closed anew. After that I watched for a while but, observed, the doors wouldn't open. Not until I turned my back to them again. Hearing that sizz of their motor, I spun around and lunged at the doors and shouted A-ha! But nothing; no one. Such an odd & lonesome sensation. For a moment I thought how wonderful it must be to live in that angel-patrolled world of the faithful, the world of Cajun mechanics with bulbous forearms, of the Munchkin with her patient, hope-fueled vigilance, of the hobbled old priest from The Drummer of Gnojno and the not-twit in the WORLDWIDE MINISTRIES, INC. t-shirt who knelt beside me several hours ago and laid his moist hand on my own spindly, Olive Oyl-ish forearm. To see the opening and closing of the doors as evidence of angels' invisible guard duty, of their soft comings and goings.

  How much simpler to lay one's head against an angel's chest and whisper, "Now."

  ***

  Nevermind. Let's check in with our correspondent Walenty Mozelewski, who is standing by in Trieste. Walenty, can you hear me? Will you please give the airline an update on recent developments there?

  The Bear was obviously weary of Walenty's shrugs and averted eyes. "I am asking you as my friend," he said, "and as my fellow fighter." Noting Walenty's wince, he said, "But I am not asking you to fight! Only to march alongside us, for a show of strength—not any use of strength, I assure you. Only your voice! Surely you can lend me your voice for a day? Surely you feel a sense of responsibility to justice—to mankind? We did not earn these wounds, me and you, for mere sport."

  Though, forgive me—some background is in order, isn't it? I forget that you're not reading along with me here. It's hard not to think of those towering blue A's above me as akin to the Eye of Providence, that divine, all-seeing eyeball that adorns, among other things, our precious dollar bill—tracking my every movement, my every grousing seat adjustment—or more darkly Tolkien's evil Eye of Sauron, but then, strike that, I'm trying to be nicer. Here we are at page 192 of Alojzy's novel, and this is what has recently unfolded: Walenty and Franca, no surprise, have become covert lovers. She steals away to his room at her mother's pensione in the predawn hours where they tenderly couple under the musical conduction of Trieste's birds which have become, for Walenty, his primary interest outside of Franca. He leaves his window open and scatters bits & ends of bread throughout his room to lure in the birds, much to the angry dismay of Franca's mother who, ignorant of his motives (and even more ignorant of her daughter's daybreak trysts with him), chides him for his slobbishness. Sometimes in the afternoons he lies on the bed and watches the birds flit through his room. His life is like a misted dream of warm skin, the sugar-dusted trills of birdsongs, the cool seaside air, his postcoital coffee, and his afternoon beers with the Bear—the unattainable attained. Or something like that. It's all a bit Hemingwayesque but that's hard to avoid when you've got a wounded ex-soldier drinking away the afternoons by the shore. For what it's worth, Hemingway would've had Walenty shoot & roast the birds.

  True, Walenty's money is running out, and occasionally he's visited by thoughts of the old life—of his two sons, particularly. He's had no word from his family in years but feels confident about their fates since he left them in the care of a cousin, a powerful black-marketeer in Warsaw. Or is it less confidence than indifference? Franca's two brothers are classic ruffians—one of them tripped Walenty at breakfast one morning, and though both brothers laughed and neglected to help him up Walenty convinced himself it was an accident and laughed along with them. Yet he can't help but wonder if this sort of thugdom is what life holds for his sons, having been tucked away with a band of criminals while the war ravaged on. Franca warned him about her brothers—if they find out about us, she told him, they'll ... but he pressed a finger to her lips.

  And now there is the Bear, who has revealed himself to be a communist rabble-rouser and a Tito partisan. Tito, the Yugoslavian bully, wants to claim Trieste as his own; the Italians, of course, have their own title staked. Tito's followers are massing for a demonstration, to be held two nights hence, and the Bear wants Walenty's support. Walenty, on the oth
er hand:

  "You don't understand," he told the Bear. He'd promised to walk Franca home from work today, and already he was late; thus he spoke swiftly. "I don't ever want to hear words like justice or peace or unity or victory again—not ever. I've heard them enough. They've been exhausted within me."

  "You don't want justice?" said the Bear, less shocked than confused.

  "Of course, but I want it to be invisible," he said. "I don't want to be forced to hear it or think about it or say it or, worst of all, to act upon it. I just want it to be, and for it to leave me alone."

  "My God," said the Bear. "What did you fight for?"

  "For this, don't you understand?" With a wave of his hand he encompassed the sea, the sky, the beer glasses on the table, the route he would walk to meet Franca. "For the skin of a woman and coffee in the morning. For birds. I fought to stop fighting."

  "For sex and birds? You're mad. You're describing an animal's life!"

  "Yes!" Walenty said. "That's precisely what I want. The life of an animal—a small, unbothered one, something humble like a mouse or even a rat. I want to eat and drink and sleep beside a woman and not think about yesterday or tomorrow—in fact I don't want even to think. I am owed this. I want only to be alive."

  The Bear was quiet for a moment, drumming his fingers on the table. Then he suddenly leaned in, and spoke gravely. "Do you know how I spent much of the last few years?"

  Walenty raised his palms. "I don't want to talk about the—"

  The Bear's voice became serrated with a low anger: "You listen to me."