Dear American Airlines

by Jonathan Miles

  "The first flight is at 9:50 and it's"—click, tap, click—"already overbooked. I'm happy to put you on standby for that one but your chances are pretty much nil. I'm just being honest. As you know we had a weather situation yesterday and we're doing our best to catch back up. Everyone here is in the same boat."

  "A boat!" I said. "Like a rowboat—that'd be faster. Can you put me on a rowboat? I'll row."

  "I apologize again, sir. I've got you on the standby list for the 9:50 and here's your boarding pass for the 11:15. Gate H4, boarding will begin at 10:45."

  "I don't think you understand—"

  "Sir, there's a very long line behind you and if I could get you out any earlier, I promise you I would. Gate H4, and thank you for flying American."

  Slinking back to my seat I spied an American Airlines "Premium Services" cart heading toward me. Figuring what the hell, I flagged it down. If anyone deserved Premium Services, I thought, I did. I might note, however, that this sense of entitlement is atypical for me. Several years back I was hosting a visiting Polish poet of limited international repute who had a taste for American strip clubs. For "pole-dancing," said this Pole. We were ensconced in an "upscale" Midtown joint where bluejeans were prohibited—I happened to be wearing such, but, undaunted, my charge had dragged me four blocks east until he found a little cockpit of a store where he bought me a flamboyant pair of polyester slacks of the type worn by marchers in the Puerto Rican Day parade—and where you were expected to order Dom Perignon by the bottle while you ogled the strippers. It wasn't long before said poet was cuddling a girl named Cookie who asked if we wanted to visit the "VIP room." Now, I understand that access to the VIP room is available to any schlub with a hundred-dollar bill, but I still couldn't follow them there. I'm just not V.I. so why pretend? I waved them on. After a while my poet returned looking glum. Cookie had munched a Slim Jim while straddling his lap—struggling with his English, which he was adamant about practicing when stateside, he called it a "meat wand" which I thought wonderfully poetic & precise—and to boot he had lost a contact lens between her bosoms. As a man of the people, I felt vindicated. I wasn't Very Important but I still had my eyesight.

  Anyway. Premium Services. A plump woman roughly my age was behind the wheel. She looked kind enough, I thought, with the sweet face of a cookie-baker. Not Cookie. A cookiebaker. V.I. Difference.

  "Mind giving me a lift?" I asked.

  "That depends, handsome," she said. "Where ya goin?"

  "Los Angeles," I said. Noting her expression, I offered to share the driving.

  "Sorry, hon," she said, with what appeared to be sincere reflection & regret. I got the feeling that had I said Cleveland she might've gone for it. She beeped the horn to get through the crowd, but it wasn't a horn sound—rather that digitized bird-song again. Her motorized sparrow flitted down the concourse and out of sight. My friend Walenty, I thought, would get a kick out of that. His dream car. The thought of him tooling up and down Trieste's hills in that little buggy, one arm on the wheel and the other around Franca, carving his way through the crowds by tweeting that avian horn—now there was rare cause for a smile.

  ***

  Short-lived, I'm afraid. Franca's brother is dead. Walenty's banner-carrying partner, the fellow with the long-bladed knife, saw Walenty being pinned down and spat upon and made a banshee charge. He grabbed the brother's hair and, after hoisting him upward, plunged the knife between his shoulder blades. Walenty's gaze darted between the two men atop him: Franca's brother, woozy and painstruck, flexing his arms sideways the way one mimics a chicken, as if to squeeze out the blade, then a ribbon of blood unfurling from his mouth as he toppled forward; and behind him his killer, Walenty's defender, for a moment looking as stolid and content as a butcher carving a ham, not even breathing very hard, until he was yanked upward into the raving crowd. To Walenty it appeared that he ascended, in the manner of saints, an impression borne out by the man's expression: His pupils went suddenly round, as if the abrupt loss of gravity was beyond comprehending, and then he was gone, chewed & swallowed by the crowd. Trapped on the ground beneath Franca's brother, Walenty viewed the subsequent riot as a torrent of boots and legs—kicking him, squashing him, leaping over him. For so long he had dreamt that bittersweet dream of his lost leg returning to him, and here now was its nightmarish obverse: a rain of useless legs.

  If it hadn't been for Franca's brother's corpse, shielding him, he would have been smothered in the stampede. The New Zealand troops squelched the riot with a bit of tear gas and a great deal of whacking people on the heads with batons; then the medics moved in. Owing to his bloodsoaked torso, the medics presumed Walenty a riot casualty and delivered him to an Allied field hospital by a river. That's where we find him now. He's caught the attention of the man overseeing the local police force, a Kiwi colonel puzzled by this one-legged Pole discovered hiding beneath a corpse.

  "Your name again?"

  "Walenty Mozelewski. Starszy kapral, Drugi Korpus Wojska Polskiego."

  "In Italian please. Or English? Eh? Little bit?"

  "I was a corporal. In the Polish II Corps. You remember Monte Cassino?"

  "I was there."

  "Me too." Walenty patted his leg. "Some of me still is."

  "And now you are here."

  "It was an accident."

  "Losing your leg, you mean?"

  "No, coming here. To Trieste."

  "Please," the colonel said. "Explain."

  So Walenty does. When he comes to the detail of Franca, the colonel throws his hands in the air and says, "Of course! A girl. It's always a girl. Dig down deep enough and I'll bet you'll find a girl was the cause of this whole goddamn war. Some German bird who wouldn't spread her legs for little Adolf, right? Brassed him off good. Go on." When Walenty finishes, the colonel offers him a cigarette and then lights one for himself.

  "A case of hamartia, then," the colonel finally said. "Do you know it? It's a word from the Greek playwrights. An innocent act that results in criminal consequences, that's what it means. Like Oedipus bedding his mother and all that. Really a sad story, yours. You boarded the wrong train and now a young man is dead because of it. And now I have to deal with the mess of this young man being dead. Hot blood around here. The people, I mean. They're hotblooded. The damn Jugs are just the half of it. In the meantime, of course, you've got to go home."

  "I don't have a home," said Walenty. "The Germans slaughtered it and then they divvied up the meat at Yalta. Now Russia is gnawing the bones."

  "How poetic. Well then, you don't have to go home," the colonel said. "You just have to go someplace else. Up the boohai for all I care. But I fear I do have to insist. Considering the trouble and all."

  "This is someplace else."

  "Not anymore," said the colonel.

  This is someplace else. Not anymore. Jesus. After smacking head-on into those lines of the novel, I closed the book and tucked it back into my satchel and went outside for a smoke. Probably for the last time, however, because the line through security to get back into the terminal area is coiled from here to Sheboy-gan. It looks so daunting to me, in fact, that I've reoccupied my former seat here beneath your towering blue A's, outside the secured terminal by the ticket counters—my old graveyard-shift perch. I need just a minute before inserting myself back into that snaked misery. I'm not quite prepared, yet again, to place my floppy shoes onto that stuttering conveyor belt; my shoes have been X-rayed so many times in the last twenty-four hours that I feel sure they've developed malignancies. By the time I reach L.A. they'll be three-eyed and glowing. And the indignity of sockfeet! Don't get me started.

  It must be nine or so. I suppose I could ask to be sure. "Nine-oh-seven," the attractive young lady next to me just answered me after conferring with her cellphone. Though the sheerness of her attire might lead one to question her quote-unquote ladyhood. She's wearing a loose black tanktop of the kind worn by professional basketball players and it hasn't escaped my attention that she's braless u
nder there. Earlier when she bent down to retrieve an Us Weekly from her carry-on I glimpsed her entire left boob in profile, a soft, inverted cone the same color as fresh buttermilk, with a delicious pink tic-tac of a nipple. The doodle on the left side of this page is the result of me pretending to write while cutting my eyes sideways. It's stunning the way a sight like that can completely derail whatever thoughts are chugging through your noggin. Even presumably focused thoughts about life, death, etc. To be or not to be. Should I stay or should I go. That age-old question ringa-dinging through history. But then you spy a wink of creamy boob and everything falls apart. You're reminded that, familiarity with Slavic languages and theories of poetic closure aside, at your core you're just another mammal, hungry and horny, who'd be a fool to want to abandon all this. Part of you screams More while another part whimpers Enough.

  The young lady's companion is a lanky, sour-faced delinquent in baggy, wounded-denim shorts and a black t-shirt that reads RAGE AGAINST something or other (I can only make out the top half). I hate to don my geezer goggles but why does this young generation talk endlessly of rage but never succumb to it? I haven't heard a bona fide howl in years. It's all spit-balls from the back of the room. Not long ago I saw notice, in a full-page Food Emporium ad in the Times's food section, of a sale on "Raspberry Rage Muffins" (four-pack for $3.99). So this is what it's come to, I thought. They're mixing rage into muffin batter. This particular young rager near me is preoccupied with his cellphone display (of course) despite his license to gawk at or even stealthily fondle the free-range breasts that have me in such a lather. I want to slap the backwards baseball cap off his head and shout, "Dammit, boy! Look at her! She won't be yours forever and there is no forever anyway so pay attention! Take her to the bathroom and fuck her until you're both squealing and laughing and so drenched with one another that everything else ceases to exist! Now! Now, dammit, now!" Like some carnal-minded Old Testament prophet in rags: Fuck now or forever hold your peace. Rage rage against the dying of the coot to your left. On the outside chance that he's her brother, however, I'll refrain.

  I need to call Speck but it's too early there. Seven-something A.M., by my calculations. You have to assume she had a big night: hoisted champagne flutes, ebullient toasts, etc. Can you imagine if I'd been cajoled into giving a toast? Hardly a thing I could have said that a random busboy couldn't have said just as well. "Nice to meet you," would have been the gist of it. Then a glass held high and: "Stella Gniech! " No, it was probably for the best I wasn't there. I wasn't missed and let's face it I never was. Oh fuck it, maybe this whole trip was a mistake. Only now am I foreseeing the difficulties I've set for myself. What if she asks if & when we can get together again? Maybe she & Syl love New York. Everyone loves New York (except me). How the hell do I field that one? In my mind I've always envisaged her like her mother: as a well-bricked wall of resentment and earned apathy. Thanks but no thanks. Naturally I've rehearsed saying sorry & goodbye but always to inanimate objects. My desk lamp must be tired of hearing me apologize. Is it owing to Stella Sr.'s frozen rebuttals that I've assumed Speck will respond in a manner similar to that lamp? Notwithstanding the "we had a deal" exchange, she's offered me nothing but warmth. When I look at Speck's high-school photo, tucked incongruously into my picture album amidst flashbulb-bleached shots of me, boozed-up and drowsy-eyed, posing beside various Polish littérateurs, I can see Stella Sr. so vividly—even the wry angle of Speck's smile is hers. But I sure haven't discerned Stella in Speck's sunlit voice. A quandary, shit. Seems I've readied myself for rejection but not for forgiveness.

  But enough about me. I fear my self-indulgent streak is more exposed than even my neighbor lady's teat. The fate I meant to address after smoking was Walenty's, not mine. What the hell does he do now? Franca is surely lost to him. He thought he could start over, could slide from one life to another as one flits from train to train in the subway—the poor fool thought he could escape. Imagine him now, roaming that New Zealand army encampment by the riverside. Wandering numbly through that too-familiar drab maze of canvas tents and marquees, guy ropes, latrines, ambulances, notice boards, gasoline heaters, stacks of empty ammo boxes. A black bicycle propped against an oil drum. A lone Kiwi lance corporal lazing in a chair tossing paper airplanes into the dirt. It must be getting dark by this time, with a fat pearl of a moon starting to dominate the sky. Walenty strays down to the riverbank—the sentry lets him pass; bugger it, the war's over—and sits awhile there, listening for any birds calling from the scraggly woods on the opposite bank; he hears only a few distant twitters that sound like a lost child, mewing in the pines. Alone, he watches the river blacken, a few moon-colored ripples fretting its surface. He tries likening his situation to the river's—"Perhaps the river," Alojzy writes, "knew things he didn't"—but he comes up empty. How many metaphors have we poets scooped from rivers? We steal them by the cupful, endlessly ballyhooing rivers' ebbs and flows, analogizing their fluid & imperturbable routes. Wordsworth on the Thames, etc. But in the end it's all dreck, or if not dreck then some form of bathetic aspiration: for our lives to course as smoothly, shifted but never stopped, draining into some glorious & storied sea. I'm reminded here of some lines from a young Grodków poet, name of Jacek Gutorow, about the wind maneuvering in tree-tops / like a relatively poor metaphor, or maybe the metaphor / was accurate but life didn't live up to it? Now there's a fucking question. Walenty flings a stick into the water and tracks its downstream float until it disappears into the gurgling dark. This is someplace else, he'd told the colonel. Please, he thinks now. Please, it has to be.

  ***

  At ten-thirty, eight-thirty Pacific time, I dialed Speck's cellphone from a payphone nearabouts Gate H4. I got her voice-mail and hung up. Dispatching the news in a voicemail message seemed crude but then again I had only fifteen minutes until boarding. Though more like thirty because, let's be accurate, boarding never starts on time. I wondered about those in-seat phones on the planes. I've never seen anyone actually use one, so perhaps they're merely decorative, like the orange trees with inedible fruit you see planted all over Sunbelt subdivisions. Them oranges look swell but try just to eat one, blech. Fearing I'd be the butt of some technological joke (the whole planeful laughing at me for trying to place a call, much the way a professorial chaperone in Tempe, Arizona, once cackled at me for peeling an ornamental orange), I re-retrieved my calling card from my wallet and was about to dial Speck again, to leave her my glum message, when the payphone rang. I leapt back as from a hot wire. After a moment I concluded it might be Speck—calling back the number that had appeared on her cellphone—but couldn't be sure, so when I answered I said, politely, "American Airlines."

  "Bennie?" It was Speck.

  "It's me," I said.

  "Why'd you say 'American Airlines'?"

  "Well, it's their phone," I said. "Are you coming?"

  "I am, but I'm going to be late," I said. "Too late for the ceremony—I'm sorry." Until that moment, when I spoke it, I believe I'd been harboring delusions that I might still make it—that the plane would have a secret turbo function, that the scheduled landing time was really just a worst-case scenario. That somehow this was all still going to go as designed. That I would walk my daughter down the aisle as I'd once imagined, make my amends, and get outta Dodge. Saying it aloud, however, I felt my entire plan break into a thousand crumbs—cake crumbs, I thought, courtesy of that line from Alojzy's novel shooting across my mind, quick as a falling star.

  "That sucks, Bennie," said Speck. "What time do you arrive?"

  "They say one thirty-five," I answered glumly.

  "Then you'll make the reception, no prob," she said, as chipper as I was forlorn. "That's the fun part anyway. You have the address, right? The band we've got is amazing. The End of the End of Love. They're clients of Syl's. They were on Letter-man on Wednesday! Did you see it?"

  "No, I missed that," I said.

  "You'll love them," she said. "I can't wait to see you, Bennie. God, to meet you
! Isn't that weird? There's a ton I need to know. Everything, right? Are you around on Sunday? The reception will be totally nuts so maybe you and I can have brunch on Sunday."

  "Sure," I said. "Yeah."

  "Okay, cool," she said. "See you soon. Oh wait, don't hang up, Mom wants to talk to you."

  I didn't see that one coming at all.

  ***

  "Bennie," she said.

  "Stella," I said back.

  She asked where I was and I explained. Of course not everything: just the landing at Peoria and the jangly bus ride and the canceled flights as depicted on the empty, blinking schedule screens and the thwarted American citizenry sleeping on cardboard boxes with wadded-up clothing for pillows ... and, in passing, and partly (I suspect) because my situation felt suddenly smaller, as if cast in a withering new light, the pernicious effect of the chairs on my back. The O'Hare Factor, I entitled it. "Seriously," I said. "I'm hurting here." She asked if I'd slept and I answered no though I worried this would make me sound off my rocker—which technically I am but why the hell broadcast it? Striking a sympathetic note, she said she hoped I had a good book along at least. I said I did. "A great one, as a matter of fact." I asked her how things were and she said "crazy"—but thoughtfully, as if things really were crazy. And then I said, "I hope I'm not adding to the craziness."

  This made her laugh, or rather pretend to: ta-HA. I believe I've told you about that vinegary laugh. "Rest assured, you are," she said. Then she asked me to hold on while she ducked into another room. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about," she said. She paused for about the same amount of time it takes to load a pistol. "Okay, look. Here's my speech. Don't screw this up."