Dear American Airlines

by Jonathan Miles

  For too long, though. By the time I finished picturing it, I had cops close on all sides of me. One of them was a short Latina, damn close to midget size, who put a gentle hand on my biceps and said, "You need to sit down, sir."

  "These people didn't do anything wrong," I said, startled to hear my voice breaking.

  "Just go sit down," she said. I did.

  ***

  Well. looks like I've spilled the beans with that episode. Or "come clean," as I believe I phrased it earlier. Maybe you already deduced it, I don't know. Despite myself, I seem to be scattering hints the way my father used to sow grass seed on our little parched lawn. The truth is that I've been mulling it for a long time—for the last couple of years, at least. Making my exit, I mean: Bennie's great escape. Back in my twenties I used to toy with the idea of suicide, but in retrospect never too seriously. Those were just hormonal doldrums, I suspect—swelters of misguided Romanticism, overdoses of Hart Crane et al. The dipshit insouciance of youth. I imagine we've all experienced those moments when we're in our cars and approaching a curve at fifty-five mph and the thought occurs: If I just neglect to turn the wheel, fail to follow the curve—whoops, the end. Yet there's a vast difference between wanting to die and not caring if you do or don't. I've done both now—the latter for much of my life—and to be frank I prefer the former. The desire for action—even final, irrevocable action—feels so much better than no desire at all. The tingle of ambition is still a tingle, even if the ambition is merely to quit. Funny: I was surprised, once I'd made up my mind, how comforting the idea seemed to me, the way it brushed the cobwebs from my head. Once I'd decided it—this was about four or five months ago, give or take—I found myself whistling as I moseyed down the street, the picture of dopey contentment. I slept less, I worked more efficiently. At times I played air-guitar along with Minideth's floor-muffled solos. I even engaged in that clinical-textbook practice of giving away my belongings. To Aneta, mostly: rows and rows of Polish books, and a bunch of cool linden-wood boxes from the Tatra mountains that I'd brought back with me from Poland.

  I'd never really figured out what to put inside the boxes, besides cigarettes and spare change, so this wasn't a dramatic liquidation. But Miss Willa noticed anyway. We are not generous people, my mother and I, and we're packratty to boot. Spurts of gift-giving raise an eyebrow. Of course you have to bear in mind my mother's own bitter flirtations with suicide; if anyone knew the routine, she did. I recall my father going haywire upon discovering that my mother had given her brand-new set of Tupperware to Mrs. Marge next door. She claimed to have developed a distaste for the color but my father, unconvinced, launched an inquisition. Ignorant of the subtext, I thought my father was being quite the miser. But he knew the terrain. Back in those days she would lie in the bathtub slicing at her wrists with a paring knife, but never quite deeply enough to crash through to the other side. I remember my father carrying her out to the car one summer night, wrapped in a bloodstained sheet. This predated the Tupperware incident by a few years—I must have been six or seven. It was dusk, I remember; she'd sent me to bed early for no valid reason I could discern. This upset me, because an early bedtime was usually punishment for some misdemeanor or other, and to my knowledge I hadn't done anything wrong. I'd even eaten the fried soft-shell crabs she'd served for dinner which was noteworthy since I was convinced they were actually battered spiders.

  My bed abutted the wall with a window overlooking the front yard, and I was sitting at the open window watching some boys playing baseball in the street beneath the old green oaks. The neighborhood mothers kept chipping away at the game by calling their sons home, and when the third-base runner got beckoned—"Willie!" his mama yelled. "Red beans!"—the other boys catcalled him for a while ("Red beans," they chided after him, "rehhhhhhhd beans!," Willie waving them off with his baseball glove, shuddup) then turned their attention back to the game. "Okay," one said. "Ghostman on third." And I remember thinking how magical that seemed to me, a ghostman on base, and then, as more mothers called, more ghostmen entered the game, until finally the boy with the bat was called in and then it was only ghostmen beneath the firefly-specked oaks—ghostmen that no one could see but me, watching them round the asphalt bases from my skybox above, my face pressed lightly to the windowscreen.

  I heard the frantic clump-clump of my father on the stairs but, charmed by the vapors of the baseball game, I didn't stir. And then I heard the front door slam and saw my father below me, carrying my mother the way new brides get carried across the threshold in old movies, and I heard my mother's weak sobs as he dumped her into the backseat of the car and then peeled out of the driveway. Ripped in two by fear and dread, I screamed after them—I wailed out the window, clawed at the screen. I don't know if I understood she might die, though by that time my grandfather had already passed so I was familiar with the mechanics of it—what I knew was that she'd suffered another "accident," and it took a long terrible time for her to recover from those accidents. Long chaotic stretches when my grandmother would move in and my father would drive me to the hospital every Saturday to visit my mother who would ask questions about the toy trucks or plastic army-men I'd brought with me but who would break into unexplained sobs when I'd try to answer. I remember removing my pillow from its case that night, after my shrieks had subsided, and putting the pillowcase over my head. It wasn't an attempt to suffocate myself, but rather an effort to shut out the world as completely as I could—to ensure that when I opened my eyes, I would see nothing, not even a ghostman. This was my analgesic: pure blackness.

  My mother's too, I suppose. Back when I was hospitalized, she flew up from New Orleans and sat by my bedside letting all the stories spill out, her long and melancholy rap sheet. I'm not sure what her precise intention was—I had enough on my mind, thank you—but I think she blamed herself for my demise, at least partly, and figured it was time to fess up. She even told me—and this caught my attention—that she'd tried to take me out with her once. I was just shy of two years old the day she sat us down on the St. Charles streetcar tracks—"We were dressed to go shopping," she said, recalling even what shoes I was wearing (Buster Browns)—and rocked me gently in her arms while waiting for the streetcar to obliterate us. Dumbly, of course, because the streetcars have brakes, but then she wasn't thinking rationally. After just a few minutes a cop spotted her, which led to a year in an institution but no criminal charges. I have no memory of it, and it seemed to me then impossible to imagine: a toddler pointing down the tracks saying, "Train? Train?" and his mother—my mother—whispering, "Yes, darling, train," with mascara streaked across her wet cheeks. "Yes, dear, the train is coming." For a very brief moment, after she'd finished, I was incensed by this story—after all those years of warped bullshit, carting me off to Florida and Atlanta and New Mexico and then finally, when I was fourteen, to Saskatchewan (which really teed off my father, because he could never pronounce Saskatchewan; he gave up and called it Alaska), poisoning me against my poor damn father, poisoning me against everything, really, save some tweedledee vision of artistic/Romantic fulfillment cribbed from a flagrant misreading of Madame Bovary—now I learn she'd once tried killing me. But when I looked at her from my hospital bed, sitting on the edge of that aluminum folding chair, her rings clacking together as she wrung her hands inside out, I felt only a terrible, crushing pity. I extended my arm to her, which she used to wordlessly sponge her tears for at least half an hour. "It's a disease," she said then, "and I don't know why we have it. Why couldn't I have cancer instead?" I remember looking around the hospital room, as blue-gray and sterile as this airport, and saying quietly, "Yes, cancer would be nice." The pair of us, two whales unable to find a shore on which to beach ourselves.

  So I should know better, right? Maybe. As I said about my father's weird strain of racism: History isn't always the best teacher. And as cockeyed as I'm sure this sounds, I can't help feeling that my mother's long sorrow stems from her failures: her inability to push through to the end,
to reach the pure blackness of that farthest Faraway. Like that feeling I had when after three days in the coma I woke up with a tube down my throat: Oh, shit. Now what? Thanks but no thanks, as Stella would say. I closed my eyes but I was still there. I'm doing my best not to wax maudlin here, but really, what's the point? Please. You there, in Texas, with your future bright & shiny as a gleaming new nickel, you with the 401(k). Tell me what to do & why. Focus on my work? On unscrambling second-tier Polish lit for the two hundred or so readers halfheartedly clamoring for it? (Hunkering down on my job was what one counselor advised. I asked if he ever read poetry. "Well, not for enjoyment," was his answer. That helped.) So then, what—take up a hobby, get a puppy, instigate pinochle games with my half-collapsed mother? In Darkness Visible William Styron wrote that hearing Brahms's Alto Rhapsody (Op. 53) was what stayed his own shaking hand, fomented his own key change from minor to major. Naturally I went out and bought it. Halfway through I got bored and retired to the kitchen for a glass of skim milk, yum. Hearing the music bleeding from my open office door, Aneta ventured that it was "bool-tiful." I sent the CD home with her and Styron died anyway.

  The thing is: My plans were all in place—vaguely, anyway; I hadn't yet decided the means of my exit—until Speck's invitation arrived, providing an unexpected wrench. The more I thought about it, though, the more I liked the way it fit into my scheme—my "exit strategy," as pundits say about wars. At first I thought I would merely attend the ceremony. I figured this might somehow seal it for me, to see the evidence of my squandering—to confirm my own meaninglessness with it, owing to my footnote of a presence, A, and B, to afflict myself with the sight of the path not taken. Like when a contestant on the old Let's Make a Deal show picked Door #1 behind which was a worthless zonk and then Monty Hall revealed the jawdropping prize behind Door #3 inspiring said contestant to want to gouge out her eyes with a hotel icepick. Less selfishly, however, I thought this might afford me the opportunity to tell Speck I was sorry, and to say farewell. And for what it was worth, to say the same to Stella. Part of me feared that this was cruel—how dare I reenter Speck's life in the last days of my own?—but another part of me rejoindered: At least you'll have made your peace with her. Better she remember a human than a sour mystery—a ghostman on third. But then I remembered that old promise I'd made to her, when she was really just a speck, that riff about walking her down the aisle one day, and I thought: Bingo. Wouldn't it be grand to fulfill one pledge in life, to reach at least one destination in this snarled journey? To go out on a high note, as it were. To do something—however small, and maybe, to everyone but me, however hollow—before quitting the game. Envisioning it, I felt this sweet warm peace washing through me, an unfamiliar sense of composure. Nothing quite like happiness, mind you—more like the satisfaction you get when you tidy up your desk and clear a path for the day. In the weeks that followed I gave more and more of my belongings away, even the fancy stereo in my office that had failed, despite its crystalline transmission of Brahms's Alto Rhapsody, to toss me a life-ring. I left it in the downstairs hallway affixed with a sign reading FREE TO GOOD HOME. (Almost instantly I regretted that, however, because I find it damnably hard to work without music playing. Creature of habit, I suppose. I moved my clock radio into my office but that sounded like hell unless I stood there holding the wire antenna out the window.)

  To be honest, I'm considering doing it out there. Not actually in California, mind you; on top of everything else, that strikes me as just plain rude. No, I've got Nevada in my head. There's no waiting period for buying handguns, & no license/ permit restrictions either, plus there's all that gorgeous desert. Can you imagine? You follow a gravel road out to where it ends, miles and miles and miles from nowhere—beyond the beyond, as they say, the real Faraway. Leave the keys in the car and start walking. Just pick a direction and walk. The place to stop will be obvious. I've got the top of a cliff in my head, someplace with a vast and soulshaking view of the desert, all that beige nothingness splayed out before me. I'm thinking a drink might be nice, too—one last vodka-tonic to accompany the sunset. No wagging your finger. I'll pick up one of those medicine-dropper-sized airline bottles—maybe I can score one on the plane. But nothing bigger, no: You want a clear head at a moment like that. And then once the sun goes down, I'll lie back on the rocks and check out the stars for a while. I imagine they're something out there, like in New Mexico. I won't spook you with the rest. Just picture the stars—that's what I'm doing.

  The "easy way out," people always sneer. What a crock. My mother had just gotten up when I was readying myself to leave for the airport yesterday morning. She was sitting in her wheelchair while Aneta combed her hair. Aneta sings to her, lightly, when she does this—sweetened, slow-mo renditions of classic rock songs, usually. She can make Foghat's "Slow Ride" sound like a nineteenth-century Polish lullaby. I asked Aneta to give us a minute, which puzzled them both.

  "So I'm on my way to the wedding," I said, and Miss Willa nodded. Her eyes were on Aneta, straightening the photos on the wall to occupy herself as she waited outside in the hallway. I'd never sought privacy from Aneta; my mother sensed something was amiss. "The car should be here any minute," I said.

  Miss Willa looks so old and fragile with her hair down like that—so raw with age, with all those coarse, bone-colored strands hemming her face. So damn helpless, is what I mean. But she'll be okay: We made a decent bundle from selling the ancestral home, pre-Katrina. I've done the math. I added her name to the lease. I even added her to my bank account so that she could cash any checks payable to me post-you-know-what (note: this means my refund check from you). And she'll understand—peas in a pod, all that. "Okay, then," I said, and then, somewhat to my surprise, my eyes began welling with tears. Well, shit. I didn't want her to see this, so I took her head in my hands, aiming her gaze downward, and bent down to kiss her forehead. I said, "I love you, no matter what," then I planted my lips on her forehead for much longer than I'd intended because I couldn't seem to detach myself. We're not prone to soft moments like this and I can't deny that a small part of me wanted to bite her—not to wound her, necessarily, but to suck out that poisoned brain the way frontiersmen used to suck the venom out of a rattlesnake bite, pa-tooey. Or maybe to wound her, let's be honest. For a moment, the scent of her freshly washed hair reminded me of the wisteria bush that sprawled beside our garage in New Orleans and sugared the springtime air, but this was just an olfactory illusion, a doleful trick of the mind. It was only old-lady shampoo from the Duane Reade sale rack. It had nothing to do with my life.

  When finally I stood back up I could tell my bluff had failed —I saw confusion and fear pooling in her eyes. She fetched her Post-it pad and pen from the side pocket of the wheelchair and wrote me a short frantic note which I folded and slipped into the inside pocket of my coat. "The car service is here," I said, though it wasn't, and with her bony hand in mine I kissed her forehead again, this time crisply, with the softness and brevity of an alighting housefly, before walking down to the street where I sat atop my suitcase with my head in my hands. My driver was from Bangladesh, said he had relatives in California. Midway up the FDR Drive I unfolded my mother's note. No, it said. That was all. I stared at it for a long while, watching it darken as the car dipped into tunnels below buildings then watching the sunlight flame it in my hand when we emerged from the gloom. No. At first the driver didn't mind me smoking but finally on the Triborough Bridge he said enough was enough. "Please, sir," he begged. "Please no more."

  ***

  This just in:

  "The earliest we can get you out is on the 11:15," said the ticket agent, name of Keisha.

  "Arriving when?"

  "Let's see"—click, tap, click of her keyboard—"1:35."

  "No, no, that's too late," I said. "I have a wedding at two. There's no way for me to make it in time."

  "Sir, I'm sorry but that's the best we can do."

  "No, no, it's not. Look, I've been here since yesterday morning
. I didn't even fly here—I was bussed from Peoria on your top-secret bus line. I haven't slept since Thursday. My sciatic nerve is so frayed from sitting in these chairs that I'm going to need my entire midsection replaced. I ate a hippopotamus turd for dinner. I was almost tear-gassed by the Chicago Police Department. All because my daughter is getting married this afternoon and I have to be there—I am going to be there. Quite frankly it's a matter of life and death."