by Jay Quinn
Karl laughed as he stood and collected Caroline’s plate along with his own. He took them to the sink and rinsed them before placing them in the dishwasher. “I need to get showered and dressed,” he said, interrupting Caroline’s apparent reverie of convent-inspired spare organization and efficiency.
“You’re all packed, right?” she replied.
“I’ll just need to drop in my dop kit once I’m dressed,” Karl said.
“I hope you remembered to pack your Tevas. There’s nothing more absurd than a middle-aged man dressed in a bathing suit with black socks and dress shoes,” Caroline said as she carefully folded the foil cover over the remains of her chocolate bar.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Caro. Give me some credit. I lived in Florida for years. I’m not such a dweeb, am I?” Karl responded irritably.
Caroline walked to him with a smile. She placed her chocolate on the counter and put her arms over his shoulders. “Did you pack your bathing suit?”
Karl sighed. “Yes. But only because I knew you’d badger me if I didn’t.” He shuddered. “Mom and Dad’s pool must be only fifty degrees this time of year. It’s hardly August, even if it is forty degrees warmer down there.”
Caroline leaned back to get a look at his face. “Still, after all these years, I like the look of you in a bathing suit, you know that?”
Karl chuckled. “Any excuse then, right?”
Caroline gave him a brief hug, and he awkwardly returned the embrace with a single arm across her shoulders. “Karl?” she asked, and stepped away.
“Yes?” he said, letting her go reluctantly.
“You’ll try not to be so at arm’s length’ with them, right? I mean, they are getting older, and we have no idea what their needs are,” Caroline said thoughtfully. “Your parents aren’t exactly forthcoming, but they must miss you. I’m sure they need you in a greater way these days.”
Karl sighed. “Look. I promise I’ll let you be the intuitive one. If you pick up on something I’m missing, stomp my foot under the table or something. I’ll admit I’m not very good with the feelings stuff, but I don’t want to appear to be uncaring.”
Caroline smiled and nodded. “Now, what are you planning to wear? The radio just said it’s twenty-eight degrees outside, but it’ll be a lot warmer once you get there.”
“Woman, I’m not five. I think I can dress myself,” Karl huffed.
Caroline laughed lovingly as he made his way out of the kitchen and on upstairs.
2
LATER, DRESSED ONLY in a bulky cotton sweater over a polo shirt, jeans, and sneakers in anticipation of the southern Florida warmth waiting to greet him, a chilly Karl watched Caroline drive away from the departure curb at RDU. Karl fought off a sense of wistfulness at their hurried good-bye. Exaggerated farewells were hardly his style, but the memory of 9/11 tinged his thoughts with foreboding, especially now, with his wife and daughter taking a separate flight. Determinedly, he left off gazing at the car making its way through traffic away from him and headed inside to experience for himself that other result of 9 /11: the line through security. With his boarding pass in hand, he tugged at his rolling carry-on suitcase and made his way inside.
The cattle stalls through security were crowded, even at the beginning of this business day. His fellow passengers included no small number of parents with children and young people among the business travelers. Karl fished his passport from his back pocket and patiently took his place in line. Try as he might, he couldn’t screen out the fragments of conversation and annoying cell phone calls all around him. Karl despised talking on his cell phone in public. He already felt soiled by the minutiae of strangers’ lives sharply shouted into the little gizmos: someone was late and forgot the toaster oven was on; someone wanted Eric to email a file; someone decided Keisha was a bitch, while someone else pronounced Latrell a motherfucking dog. Karl hated adding the details of his own life to the miasma, though he knew he’d need to call Sven from the gate.
At last, he was next. He handed his passport and boarding pass to a disinterested overweight woman in a TSA uniform. With barely a glance, she scribbled something unintelligible on his boarding pass and curtly nodded for him to proceed to the tables and tubs before the x-ray machines. Karl hoisted his suitcase onto the table, pulled a gray tub from the stack, and placed it behind his suitcase. He quickly emptied his pockets into the tub and kicked off his shoes, placing them on top of his wallet, keys, and loose change. As the conveyor belt pulled the suitcase and tub into the maw of the x-ray machine, Karl stepped up to the metal-detecting gate and obediently waited for permission to pass.
The TSA man on the other side smiled at him genuinely and waved him through. When Karl successfully passed without a beep, the man reached for his passport and boarding pass and wished him a good morning.
“You’re very cheerful today,” Karl said amiably.
“Payday here and weekend’s coming,” the man answered with a smile.
His geniality was contagious. Karl found himself smiling in return.
“You go safe now, sir,” the man said sincerely as he handed Karl his passport and boarding pass.
“You’ve actually made this pleasant,” Karl commented.
The man laughed. “Just another service I offer. Bad enough to wait in line; might as well send you folks off with a smile. “
“Thanks for that,” Karl said genuinely.
The man nodded and moved to allow Karl to pass beyond him to the suitcase and tub waiting for him. Karl felt warmed by this touch of the personal as he plucked his shoes from the tub and dropped them to the floor. He awkwardly tried to step into them, but he succeeded only in squashing the heels under his half-inserted feet. Aware of the press behind him, he gathered his change and wallet, placed his suitcase back on the floor, and hobbled off to wait in line once more for a place to sit and comfortably fit his sneakers to his feet. Finally, a seat became available and Karl clumsily stepped to it and sat down.
“Ain’t this a bitch?” an older woman examining a small run in her stockings said to Karl as he perched beside her.
Karl leaned forward to run a finger under his sneakers’ bent backs and let out a small reserved laugh. “I suppose it’s better to go through this than through a skyscraper.”
The woman sighed and leaned forward to slip an uncomfortable-looking pair of heels over her stockinged feet. “Remember when it was a privilege and an event to fly? Remember when it was something you looked forward to?”
“Not so long ago, was it?” Karl answered carefully.
“Honey, I’m Advantage Platinum. One hundred and thirty thousand miles last year. I’ve seen the inside of enough planes to last the rest of my life, but there’s three more years of this until I can cash out. How about you?” the woman asked briskly.
“I don’t know if I’m going to ever get to cash out, but fortunately I love my job,” Karl said and stood.
“Hartford,” the woman said as she stood as well and stuck out her hand.
“West Palm,” Karl replied and clasped her hand in a firm shake.
“Lucky,” she replied, and let Karl’s hand go. “Vacation?”
“Family.”
“Think of me in the snow, will you?”
Karl smiled, and the woman smiled in return, then said, “Well… another day, another PowerPoint presentation.” With that, she clasped the handle of her carry-on and turned resolutely toward her gate. As Karl watched her walk away, he thought about the companionability of the business world. From his looks, his age, and his studied air of nonchalance with the whole ordeal, the older woman had recognized in Karl a fellow air veteran—a fellow traveler heading for the gate of some reward that was approachable but still somehow out of reach. Karl felt more middle-aged than he had m a long time. It was not a particularly happy feeling. Most days he saw himself as he was at perhaps forty or so. Vital, loved, and respected, he never stopped to think of the air miles, the days that passed below as he soared from project to proje
ct, each a legitimate success bought by hard work and some inspiration.
The woman disappeared into the crowd and Karl turned himself toward his gate in the opposite direction. For a moment, he felt the sharp sting of the loss of all his individuality. He was just another traveler with a wait at the gate before him. It was an oddly depressing thought. As he made his way into the crowd and found a place in the flow of other travelers, he weaved through the baby strollers and rolling suitcases with the cold comfort that at least he was traveling to someplace warm, someplace where he would be welcomed with few expectations of him other than that he care about the people waiting for him there. He scolded himself for resenting his family for this trip out of his routine, for the demands they would subtly but undeniably make on his heart.
This resentment of his family was nothing new. Karl’s sudden sensation of letdown at being recognized as one more anonymous middle-aged businessman in a crowd of other strangers in the airport was sharpened by the realization that it was, in some ways, exactly what he had always striven to be. The facts of his individuality among them wasn’t anything he’d ever viewed with any pride, because those facts rested in his family’s unique composition. While Karl’s father was solidly American and middle-class, his mother was the daughter of a Swedish diplomat. After a childhood in Sweden, she had been educated from age twelve in a French convent school just outside Paris. She was a beautiful woman, but her ideas of child rearing and her exoticism in southern New Jersey and southern Florida had been an embarrassment to Karl while he was growing up. By the time his family moved to Boca Raton when he was twelve, he’d refused to speak either Swedish or French and had urged his mother to limit her cooking to things purely American. His mother had only laughed at the menu suggestions, but she had allowed him to slip away from the languages she’d spoken to him since infancy and from her rather strict form of Catholicism. She took his embarrassment over both her beauty and her strangeness in stride, allowing him the freedom to become as blandly American as apple pie and baseball. She was not so eager to surrender his brother, Sven, however, and as a result Karl tended to see Sven as an embarrassment as well. While these strains were never really discussed, what was not said was clearly understood. Karl ultimately moved away from his family and lived his life far away in North Carolina’s Research Triangle area, a place eager to shed the distinctiveness of its past to embrace the modern and new.
At the gate, Karl noted with irritation that all the seats were taken exept those facing away from the door to the jetway. The crowd at the gate sprawled under the imposing overhead screens loudly tuned to CNN. Happily, there was no one waiting at the gate’s ticket area but two agents working at their mysterious tasks with an animated air of authority. Impulsively, Karl decided he needed a treat. With some polite finagling and a little luck, he was able to purchase an upgrade to first class.
With professional warmth, the agent informed him they’d begin boarding in ten minutes. While Karl was grateful for the short waiting time, he also realized the immediate need to use his cell phone to check in with his brother. He made his way to the relative privacy of the concourse’s edge, away from the waiting passengers. After he found his cell phone in the upper zippered pocket of his carry-on, he consulted his boarding pass for Sven’s phone number, which he’d carefully copied in his office.
Sven answered cheerfully after only two rings.
“Good morning, Sven. Are you ready to pick up your old brother?” Karl asked jocularly, with a heartiness he’d had to search to find.
Sven laughed. “I’m looking forward to it! Is your flight on time?”
“Looks that way…” Karl hesitated, searching for something else to say. “I upgraded to first.” He laughed. “This is starting to look like a vacation.”
“You deserve it,” Sven answered. “It’s like a Trailways bus in the sky back in steerage.” Silence hung heavily between them for a moment before Sven broke the quiet stretching in long radio waves between towers. “We’re really looking forward to having you come home, Karl. Mom and Dad are really excited, and I’m just glad to have some time to visit with you.”
Karl was taken aback by the genuine affection he heard in his brother’s voice. “It… it’ll be good to be home,” he replied. “Will we get to see much of you?”
“I think so, Karl,” Sven said and hesitated. “Mom isn’t at her best; Dad thinks it would be better if you all stayed with me once Caroline and Melanie get here.”
Karl noted the hesitation and a bit of anxiety in Sven’s voice. “Is anything wrong with Mom? You say she’s not at her best—what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Sven replied quickly. “She’s, well, it’s just that she gets all excited with a houseful of company and overdoes it. I think she’ll enjoy the weekend a lot more if she doesn’t have to worry about towels and linens and stuff like that. You see?”
“What about Dad?” Karl asked, not really put at ease by Sven’s breezy reasoning.
“Oh, Dad’s… well, Dad’s the same. I mean, he feels great, good health, no need to worry about him. In fact, he’s looking forward to having you all to himself tonight. He’s made that really clear.”
Karl winced. He knew his father had no compunctions about batting Sven away like a worrisome fly. He felt the sting of it on Sven’s behalf. “Same old Dad, then.”
Sven chuckled. “That and more. The irritable old bastard.”
Karl laughed, relieved. “So you want to just pick me up downstairs by baggage claim?”
“Sounds good. About five after eleven then?”
“Yes. That ought to be just about perfect timing. I’ve only got a carry-on bag. I’m wearing a gray sweater and jeans,’’ Karl said.
“Oh, I’ll recognize you, big brother. It hasn’t been that long. See you then.”
“Alright.”
“Fly safe, Karl. I love you,” Sven answered happily.
Taken aback, Karl looked around him warily. “Ummm, yeah. That’s back at you, as the kids say.”
“Cool,” he responded. “Bye,” and he hung up.
Karl sighed and folded his phone and placed it back in the pocket of his carry-on. Zipping it shut, he glanced around. There was nothing to do now but get there.
On the plane, Karl accepted a drink—a screwdriver—something he almost never did in the morning. From his comfortable seat by a window in first class, he idly watched the unremarkable passing of clouds and soon drowsed into a satisfying sleep, only to wake with a start at some subconscious cue. Outside the window by his head, a USAir plane traveling north hurtled past close enough to register alarm. In all his years of flying, Karl couldn’t remember seeing another plane pass so nearby. On the flight back from Italy earlier that year, there had been a companionable British Air that had flown slightly below and at a measured distance from their wing for the entire trip over the Atlantic. It had been comforting having the other plane as a neighbor for the long trans-Atlantic trip. But seeing this plane so close by was wholly disconcerting.
Typically, there are few ways for passengers to gauge exactly how fast they are traveling in the air. The clouds, the crazy quilt of fields and roadways on the ground moved leisurely as you watched them. Karl knew the plane had to be doing nearly four hundred miles per hour, if not more. The distance covered and the rate calculated in his typically left-brain thinking assured him of the fact, but there was no sensation of speed, no sound other than the steady white noise of flight. There was no visceral proof, no gut feeling to warn you of the reality of blasting through the thin air thirty-three thousand feet above the ground. With the passing of the USAir flight in the opposite direction, Karl was, for the first time, aware of the speed he was traveling.
Earlier, in the airport, Karl had been startled by the ordinariness of his age and station in life. The experience of making his way through security, and the possibility of disaster it implied, had been a grim reminder that it all could suddenly end, violently suspended by a set of circumstances ove
r which he had no control. Karl signaled the flight attendant and lifted his empty glass. The USAir flights passing was a marvelous sensation, at once nauseating and thrilling, making the speed so vividly real to him. His life was moving faster than he had any sensation of or any real control over.
Karl accepted the new drink with a grateful smile and a slightly unsteady hand. It didn’t occur to him then that everyone else’s lives were traveling at the same unimaginable speed.
3
THE WARM BREEZE and the rough trunks of palm trees welcomed him home as he stepped onto the sidewalk outside the baggage claim doors. The Florida sun and the waving fronds overhead were hidden by the departure ramp above, but he felt his body relax with remembered fondness. Karl had not quite been a teenager when his father had decided to move south from New Jersey to Boca Raton. It had been a prescient move on his father’s part: he would be in place and ready when IBM moved to Boca Raton years later, and would begin work that would ultimately take him from being an ordinary electrical engineer to being one of the men who midwifed the birth of the computer age.
Karl was nearly thirteen then and unaware of anything other than the fact that he found himself with a new life in the sun and a new baby brother. It was a memorable year and a memorable time as he found his feet on the unfamiliar shores of adolescence and brotherhood, all wrapped into one. Each was as strange and new to him as the orange trees growing in the backyard.
The warm, sleepy lump he’d held in his arms had become Sven, and his new life in Florida took him places he never dreamed he’d go. For years he experienced the kind of adolescence that the media portrayed as idyllic. While the Vietnam War raged on, Karl grew tanned and strong, swimming in the warm Atlantic and feeding his mind on the miracles of NASA. He never failed to reconnect with that notion of himself, that sense of life’s exhilarating promise, when he returned to southern Florida. A sensation of raw newness washed over him every time he found himself back in Boca Raton.
