Up The Stream of Consciousness Without a Paddle

Brace yourselves.

Written from scratch without an outline and without looking back, here's my winning entry in National Novel Writing Month 2005.

How do you win? Easy, write non-stop starting November 1st and don't quit till you hit 50,000 words or November 30th, whichever comes first. There's a link to the website on your right.

Is this a work of fiction or a frenzied game of word association? Beats me.

I'll preface with a quote from Thomas Mallon's book on diary writing, "A Book of One's Own," which I stumbled on in mid-novel.

"Is there something about writing so fast that inevitably leads to a kind of drained resolution, the pen having been turned into a runner that knows, perhaps not consciously, that it will break the tape and collapse in exhausted victory? If that is so, when one wakes from the rest that follows, is the victory still real, still there?"

"Mr. Barbicane Takes A Trip" Chapter One

Mr. Barbicane liked travel. Not going places, but traveling; being in motion, being between this place and another place. Suspended. Occupied with the tasks of travel.

He liked packing. Buying small “travel” size items in the drugstore. Arranging to stop the mail and the newspapers. Adjusting timers on lights in different rooms of his house so that it would appear not only that the house was occupied, but that the occupant had an elaborate schedule of moving from one room to another, turning on some lights, turning other lights off. Making sure that the last light left burning was the one in his bedroom in order to give the impression to anyone watching the house that the owner had retired for the evening and was, perhaps, reading in bed for a while before going to sleep. He set the timer for that light to go off at one a.m. The things most people hate about travel were the things that gave him the most pleasure.

He liked airports. The civic motion of the places, the need to have certain documents in order to be able to proceed from point A to point B. He liked pulling a suitcase along endless terminal corridors, past repetitions of the same franchise food and drink storefronts; like a stretch of hermetically sealed completely artificial main street. Others recoiled from this processed experience, from this pretend life. He did not. He took comfort in it. It made no demands of him.

He liked airplanes. He was in childlike awe of the technology. He had limitless respect for the people who were able to maintain and control these remarkable machines. He enjoyed the consistent service of cabin attendants and strove to make their job as easy as he could. Others complained about the quality of food and drink while flying, but he did not. He simply marveled at the very concept of sitting in a relatively comfortable chair and eating hot food while hurtling through the sky, suspended by the Bernoulli Principal; a scientific given he didn’t understand and couldn’t articulate, but believed in completely. He liked the power of the engines. He liked the beads of moisture occasionally trapped between the double pained porthole glass. He liked the smell of jet fuel and the colorful crowds of parked cars in the parking lots swooped over upon arrival and departure.

He liked hotels. Convenient hotels. Practical places with practical furnishings contained by practical, useful architecture. What others thought bland and predictable, he found comforting and uniform. He liked the generically welcoming lobbies, especially the ones with fountains. He like the orderly transaction of checking in and going to the elevators. He liked walking down hotel corridors, anonymous spaces decorated to feel like someone’s home, but never looking like any home anyone’s ever seen. He liked the large mirrors that always face the elevators on the individual floors. He liked the groaning complaint of the ice machine locked in its lonely room at the end of each corridor.

He liked hotel rooms. Simple, logical boxes containing anything a traveler might want or need during his brief stay. He liked the many telephones, more than a single person might need, but all at your disposal. He liked the glowing digits of the clock radios. He liked the faux-headboards always bolted to the wall and not the bed frame. He liked the televisions that were usually hidden in amoires above the mini-bars. He did not like mini-bars, but found their existence in no way reduced his pleasure of the overall hotel room experience. He liked the sealed windows, especially when they overlooked parking lots, and the controls of the heating and air conditioning systems either mounted to the wall, or hidden behind a small metal door in a unit built under the window. He liked card keys, rectangles of plastic you slide into a slot above the door handle which resulted in a small prick of green light to let you know you were expected and would be welcomed by the empty room beyond the door.

He liked renting a car. The idea of a large corporation finding you substantially trustworthy and able that they would entrust several thousand dollars of their machinery to your care in a world full of collision and catastrophe. He liked the plastic key-fob with the company’s logo and car’s information all there, dangling below the ignition as you drove unfamiliar roads and listened to unfamiliar radio voices. He enjoyed discovering the tricks and secrets of different dashboards. What combination of taps and slides worked the windows and vents. He like the different mechanical tapping sounds different turn signal indicators make. Always sounding mechanical and not electronic. As if there was a real clockwork device of some sort creating the noise by physically tapping two pieces of metal or plastic together. All around you in the cockpit of the modern automobile there are tones and beeps and sighs and voices, there are glowing screens crawling with information, numbers flickering up and down as you increase speed or change CDs. But the turn signal indicator noise always sounds organic amid all these synthetic warnings and confirmations. A click. Like the small metal cricket toys he remembered as a child.

Two pieces of metal, forged together, one painted like a cricket or a frog, the other stiff and flat. You pushed the undecorated piece until it snapped, the hollow of the other piece amplifying the sound. Click. Then you release the metal and it snaps back to its original position. Clack. Was it really something you could consider a toy? It was certainly a noise maker, but was it a toy? What was supposed to be so amusing about the manufacture of this one, rather this pair of sounds?

And why had the automobile industry decided that everything else about the driving experience should be dragged into the future, but this one element, this one sound would never change? Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Then, upon completion of the turn and the righting of the wheel, that other thunk of the turn signal clunking back to its neutral position. This they decided to hold on to. He was glad they had, but he still wondered why. And he wondered how the sound itself was produced. By what agency or device, tucked in among the diodes and displays.

Destination was of no concern. Neither was the purpose of the trip. The solace, the relief, the pleasure came from being in that flux state, that not there, not here, but somewhere between the two. Motion lifted his spirits. It made him feel safe, untouchable. He was no more or less important than the traveler in front of him on the line to remove their shoes or the traveler behind him, the one complaining about the additional security.

He liked the additional security. He liked the double checking of documents, the additional searches, the additional questions, the need to prepare himself for the metal detector and the random attention of the bored looking security personnel. What was irritation to others, was another chance to cope for him.

He liked putting his change and wallet and wrist watch and sometimes his belt in the small tray and sending it through the x-ray machine. He liked even more the retrieval of those personal items on the other side of the metal detectors. He stood at the end of the conveyor, reclaimed his possessions, each one now a prize to be savored; the watch back on the wrist, the wallet back in the pocket, the change and keys in another pocket. With the reinstatement of each item his satisfaction would grow.

Travel made demands, immediate demands that had to be dealt with. Challenges to respond to and rise above, filling his life with a multitude of tiny victories which must eventually add up to a triumph. The nature of that triumph had not been revealed to him. All he knew was that each petty task accomplished brought him nearer a summit tantalizingly obscured by boiling clouds.

And in the meantime, there was the accomplishment of travel. A real accomplishment measurable by boarding passes announcing the miles transversed and hotel bill print outs detailing each meal and phone call, each night. Life made tangible.

In that bubble of movement he felt more alive than when he was still and surrounded by his possessions. In the wave that was travel there was nothing to prove. It was all about movement, about the lateral gravity that pulls you from place to place. In this transitional condition, he felt he was free of the responsibility to control his life, and he could see the physical manifestations of that liberating surrender all around him. It was peaceful. He was not a failure. He became buoyant, drifting above the process. Patient, practical, compliant, cooperative, good-natured, he did nothing to impede the travel of others or the important work of those who facilitated his movements. No one could say a bad word about him. No one would even remember he had been among them.

"Mr. Barbicane Takes A Trip" Chapter Two

This particular trip began well in that it began at the Burbank Airport which he much preferred to the larger Los Angeles International Airport. Certainly the Burbank Airport was closer to his home and allowed him to leave much later and park at a much more reasonable rate closer to the airport, but central to the pleasure of flying out of Burbank is that it was one of the few remaining facilities that, because of its history of more than seventy-five years of service, it was built at ground level. This meant that passengers had to walk outside of the terminal, cross the tarmac and actually climb a set of stairs to reach the cabin door of their aircraft.

This ritual of leaving a building to enter a plane is something most associate with those distant days before the “jet-way,” the flexible hallway that snakes from the departure area to the open hatch so that you begin your flight by walking through a fluorescent chute that feeds you toward the plane like animals on their way to market. A herd of travelers.

But at Burbank, you walk out into the weather, and climb the stairs like countless diplomats and movie stars in countless news photographs. You move with The Beatles and Marilyn Monroe. Reaching the top of the stairs there is the often irresistible urge to turn and wave once more for the cameras, or at least the coveralled workers on the baggage tractors.

This ghost of air travel past pleased Mr. Barbicane. It was a small symbol, but a potent one and meant that the trip would be well begun.

He had arrived early…he always arrived early…made his way from ticket counter to security to men’s room to newspaper stand to departure area where he checked in again, showing his boarding pass to the ticket agent who smiled and agreed with him that he was all set, then he sat in one of several chairs bolted together and secured to the floor near the door that would open to the tarmac and the aircraft beyond. He sat with his one practically packed and dimensionally acceptable carry-on bag and waited. Waited for that moment of transition when he would officially become a passenger.

These moments before the transformation left him feeling vulnerable and somewhat anxious. Arguably he was already a passenger. He had made a reservation, paid for his ticket, passed through the security check point which was clearly labeled at the point beyond which only PASSENGERS WITH BOARDING PASSES were permitted to go. Yet there was always the possibility that something might deny him that final transcedency of status. There might be mechanical difficulties or scheduling problems that could result in the cancellation of the flight.

The thought of this stoked his anxiety. He was reminded of a grim night begun at this very airport a few years earlier. He had arrived on time and gone through the process of search and inspection. But he was still merely a customer and not a passenger. To become a true passenger, one must slip the surly bonds of earth and escape into the sky, sever all ties with a terrestrial identity and move into the clouds like a watchful angel.

On the night in question he was denied that ascendancy. His short flight from Burbank to San Francisco was at first delayed because of weather and “traffic.” This was common with San Francisco so there was no initial concern. But as the evening and the waiting stretched on he became increasingly skeptical of his ability to leave. This churned his mind in a most distressful fashion. The degree of that distress was in itself distressful and served to increase his apprehension. Apprehension had spilled over into something like desperation when the announcement finally came that the flight had been canceled.

The airline regretted this unfortunate event. Their representative, a young woman named Connie, acknowledged the inconvenience this might create among the waiting people and, on behalf of her employer, took full responsibility for the situation. In an effort to make amends, passengers would be rebooked and complimentary travel vouchers supplied. But they weren’t passengers. And now they would not be passengers.

He took the voucher and new boarding pass for a flight the next day from the lovely hand of young Connie, a woman of perhaps twenty-eight years. He watched her peach colored lips form the words of apology but heard nothing of what she said. She could not be heard over the turmoil of his mind.

So close to that elevated station, that condition of motion, he was now turned away at the very gates of Valhalla, cast out of the terminal into the thick Burbank heat, forced back into that earthly status he had dearly hoped to escape.

What followed was one of the most miserable nights of his existence as he had to reverse the order of the steps that had brought him to the brink of happiness. The shuttle bus to the long term parking lot, the walk from the bus to the car, then the exit from the lot which included the challenging look from the lot attendant when the parking ticket was processed and the shameful truth that his “long term” parking had lasted less than three hours appeared accusingly on the screen. Then home to a house that had gotten on without him, that had been programmed to exist in his absence and now was forced to receive him, take him back. He felt like an invader. Like a housebreaker. Some fetishistic interloper who went into other people’s homes, used their toothbrushes, slept in their beds, pretended to belong.

He thought the night would never end. At the first light of dawn he left the house, shrinking away from his now accusatory windows, to return to the airport hours before his rescheduled flight. But the rituals that so calmed him the day before only served to agitate him; he knew that no matter how deeply into the process of benediction he managed to get, it could all be taken away from him.

He had done nothing to deserve the previous expulsion and there was nothing he could have done to prevent it. While powerlessness was one of the things he strived for by becoming a passenger, this inability to achieve passenger-ness through no fault of his own left him shaken, as if he’d never considered how arbitrary life could be.

The repeated gestures of that morning did nothing to calm him. His mouth was filled with a tense, acrid, bile sort of taste as he waited to board. And when the plane finally pushed back, finally lumbered onto the taxi way, finally reached the end of the runway, finally charged forward, angled up and left the earth, he unlashed his seatbelt the moment the captain gave him permission and rushed to the phone booth sized bathroom and threw-up into the brushed metal of the toilet, squeezed by terrible crushing waves of nausea that produced little more than viscous strings of yellow mucus that were pulled into the belly of the aircraft by a swirl of blue liquid.

The ghost of that experience never left him. It arrived like the distant warning of an impending headache during that suddenly stressful period between checking in and boarding. It was the reminder that the gift of flight could be revoked without courtesy or explanation. The realization that his desire to leave was not a strong enough force in itself to achieve escape. There were forces at work. Forces that cared nothing for his needs or worthiness.

"Mr. Barbicane Takes A Trip" Chapter Three

A lesser man might have been crippled by this experience. He might turn away, frightened or chastised or bitter, swearing never again to put himself in a position where fate might again play with him so cruelly. But Mr. Barbicane did not declare such a repudiation. The experience had tempered his passion, but did not diminished it. It certainly served to increase his gratitude and his understanding of what a blessing the true status of passenger was. It helped him monitor his emotions as he went through the process, kept him from peaking too early.

The most negative thing was that gap, that space before boarding in which there was nothing to do but wait to see if the starts would align, as they did with much more regularity than not, and permit him the change he sought, the transformation that renewed his heart and lightened his load through life.

It was important to remain calm, to step back, to focus on level breathing, to avoid looking at clocks, to go to a calm, inner place, there to await the moment when an amplified voice, usually female, summoned him to the door, summoned him not by name, but by a range of row numbers; announcing that he was going to be permitted to proceed.

This is what Mr. Barbicane did as he waited. He also filled the minutes by thinking about the journey that was ahead of him. The trip would take him through an airport he knew to an airport he did not. Yes, it was to be a connecting flight.

While many travelers dislike the idea of connecting flights, the concept of multiple take-offs and landings, of boarding, de-boarding, moving through another airport and repeating the check-in and boarding process, Mr. Barbicane did not. To him, a connecting flight was an opportunity for added passenger experience. Sometimes he thought about the time spent at an intermediate airport between connecting flights might be the best, the purest, most transcendental part of being a passenger.

It certainly was the ultimate in suspension; to be somewhere that had nothing to do with where you were going except as a place to be passed through. It wasn’t as if you were even visiting a different city because you never really got to see the city. You were at the airport. You were outside of the city the airport serviced. You were in that wonderfully sealed, ever familiar geography of Airportia. What bliss.

We would land and take-off from the Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport, the second largest in the nation, which was actually spread over more than eighteen thousand acres of the cities of Euless, Grapevine, Irving and Coppell, Texas. DFW, as it is officially abbreviated, consists of five north-south parallel runways and two diagonal runways, four terminals with a total of one hundred and thirty-seven aircraft boarding gates. It was a beautiful complex of moving sidewalks, swift trams, and an endless selection of hand-held food and drink. He would be one of more than fifty-nine million people who would pass through the place, taking up momentary citizenship in one of the capsulated fiefdoms that make up the nation of Airportia. One of fifty-nine million transitioning through this airport alone. The number made with woozy with comfortable anonymity.

He would spend a scheduled hour and forty minutes at DFW, changing planes, which could mean walking a few yards between two adjacent gates, or perhaps having to take a tram from one end of the busy metropolis to the other. Then he would be pulled into the sky again, on his way to a place he’d never been. A place the very name of which called to him now: Pittsburgh. He had never been to Pittsburgh. He had heard remarkable things about the airport there and had great hopes for the place.

Activity was increasing at the ticket counter guarding the door that lead to the tarmac; more people checking in, confirming their seats, preparing to depart.

One might assume Mr. Barbicane was a great observer of his fellow travelers. One would be wrong. Frankly, they were of no interest to him and for the most part he offered them the temporary social invisibility he wanted for himself. They were a blur to him, an essentially uniform collection of interchangeable types as generic as the people you see clustered around the drawings of buildings in architectural renderings, figures added to give the building perspective and indicate it was inhabitable and welcoming to the general population.

Now a dozen of them were strung out in a line at the counter. Men, women, children, all different and yet all the same in their need or desire to leave this place and go somewhere else. He looked at them, trying to bring them into focus, but found this difficult. He could see the space in vivid detail; the corners of the counter, the red of the lights articulating the flight number and status, the perpendiculars of tense-bar stanchions keeping his fellow travelers in line, but he couldn’t coordinate any information about the people. They were broken up into mosaic details; bags, hats, shoes, hands with ticket folders, hands with wallets, empty hands, the sides of heads, ears, bellies, cylindrical body shapes, bodies with the silhouettes of gently turned piano legs. But he was having trouble coordinating the details of any one person. He couldn’t keep this head with the appropriate shoulders, above the supporting torso, atop the associated legs. Trying to bring their faces into clarity was even more difficult. The faces broke down as well, into noses and eyes and lips, like the elements of children’s book where you flip through the possibilities trying to produce the funniest and most grotesque combination.

He looked away.

There was a cart by the door that led to the tarmac. When he checked in at the counter the girl in the crisp blue uniform told him that it was an experiment in service on shorter flights. As passengers passed through the door, they were to select an insulated paper bag from the cart which was refrigerated. Each bag contained a sandwich, a cheese and cracker snack, an apple, a chocolate chip cookie and a napkin. In flight service would consist of beverages only. The girl then informed Mr. Barbicane that he could take a bag if he wanted to, but since he would be sitting in one of the small aircraft’s first class seats, a full meal would be provided.

He decided that when the moment came, he would take a bag lunch for himself. He could keep it and it could serve as his dinner or late night snack when he arrived in Pittsburgh. He liked the self-contained convenience of the thing. That and the fact that it was free.

The time for boarding would soon be upon him. He stood up, took hold of his bag and made one last visit to the men’s room before returning to the departure area to stand near the door and await the announcement that it was time to board the aircraft.

The girl who had rechecked him for the flight and informed him of the bag lunch service picked up the handset of a phone hidden under the lip of the counter, punched in a code to give her access to the immediate area’s public address system and told the waiting people the flight was ready for them. She then explained how the passengers would be segregated to better facilitate boarding. Older people, people traveling with small children and people who for unstated reasons felt they needed extra time to find their seats were encouraged to board the plane at this time. Then first class passengers and passengers with an elevated status due to the amount of travel they did on this particular airline would be invited to step outside. Mr. Barbicane was part of this group. Others would be permitted access to the plane based on their seat location.

There were only a handful of people who fit the specifications of the first group so it was all of perhaps two minutes before the group containing Mr. Barbicane was invited to step forward.

He did so, boarding pass in hand, the space between his status as unremarkable person and passenger was now measurable in feet. Another pretty girl examined his boarding pass and returned it with the wish that he should have an enjoyable and rewarding journey. He thanked her, took a bag lunch from the cart near the door, then stepped out into the morning sun blasting the tarmac.

"Mr. Barbicane Takes A Trip" Chapter Four

On the other side of the door he found the air thick with the fumes of jet exhaust, a singularly exciting scent. Concrete spread out in all directions to the horizon. Ahead of him, above him, waiting, was a silver Boeing MD-87 built in 1994 at the Boeing plant in Long Beach, California.

The overall length of an MD-87 is one hundred and thirty feet four inches, with a wing-span of one hundred and seven feet eight inches, and a height at its tail of twenty-nine feet six inches. It’s maximum take-off weight, which in the configuration Mr. Barbicane was about to board consisted of the weight of the airframe itself added to the weight of one hundred and thirty passengers, nine hundred and thirty-seven cubic feet of cargo and seven thousand U.S. gallons of JP-4 jet fuel, plus its two Pratt and Whitney JT8D-217C engines (which can generate a total maximum thrust of twenty thousand pounds), was one hundred and forty-nine thousand pounds, or seventy-four and a half tons. The MD-87 is capable of attaining speeds of up to five hundred and four miles per hour, which is just over three quarters of the speed of sound, with an effective range of four thousand three hundred and ninety-five nautical miles. Boeing terminated production of the MD series in December, 1999.

It seemed to Mr. Barbicane that there was nothing so beautiful, so emblemic of all that is good in modern man as the sight of this metal skinned machine that seemed to loom over him like the frozen form of some ancient beast on display in a museum. The closer he went, the more his perspective was distorted, the larger the nose of the plane became, the longer its body, the more distant it towering tail.

Soon he would be within the beast, a part of it. Soon he would lose all control over his life, surrendering it to this construct of metal and plastic. He would be taken in and once inside he would not only be forbidden by federal law to interfere with the operation of the aircraft in any way, he would be intellectually prohibited from doing so.

Often he looked to the left when he stepped onto a commercial aircraft, hoping the door to the cockpit would be often. In there he glimpsed a room crowded with information and controls, their purpose and intelligence beyond Mr. Barbicane’s understanding. His ignorance of these items made him giddy. And carved out of the wall of controls, a horizontal window looking out over the abbreviated nose of the aircraft. Looking straight ahead, a direction no passenger was permitted to share; all Mr. Barbicane and the others were permitted was a sideways vantage point. They could look off to either side, but could not see forward, they could not see ahead of them. They could not see where they were going. It would be too much for average mortals. On board he would be useless. He would be without purpose. He would be…the word rose in his chest on a bubble of expectation…a passenger.

He climbed the steps to the forward cabin door. For a moment he was level with the swept wing to his right. He glanced over, at the rounded edge of metal, at the circular dots of the counter sunk rivets holding the wing together, holding it to the fuselage. He saw apertures and divots, tiny pieces of metal thrust up from the skin, small spaces marked with codes and everywhere tiny yellow warning stickers, the simple, oft repeated, non-negotiable shibboleth: NO STEP.

At the top of the stairs, while the line of people ahead of him was temporarily stalled by some congestion inside the aircraft, he looked around, looked back. He looked at the cracks in the tarmac below. He looked at the seal around the cabin door. He was going on a trip. He would be leaving soon. He would be unavailable, in transit, on his way. He would be neither here nor there.

There was unseen resolution in the cabin ahead of him and the march of people resumed. A moment and Mr. Barbicane stepped into the aircraft, stepped over a narrow crack, a gap between the edge of the top of the rolling stairs and the threshold of the cabin door. Through this gap morning sun bounced up from the pavement and burned a brief slash across the inside of his eyes, a slash that remained like a ghost on his vision for several seconds once he had crossed over to enter the machine.

There was a woman there in a blue-gray uniform with hair the color of a raven’s wing. She had olive skin and smiled at Mr. Barbicane and asked if he knew where he was going. The context of this question was restricted to his placement in the aircraft and not what is referred to as his final destination. He told her he did know where he was going and started down the long tube of regimented seats.

He did not march far, because Mr. Barbicane, thanks to the timely use of frequent flyer miles, was traveling in the first class cabin. He located his window seat, placed his bag in the overhead compartment and dropped into his seat, immediately fastening and tightening his seat belt.

The plastic outer covering of his window was etched with a hundred thousand miles of scratches, the result of sub-sonic sand and dust shrieking along the side of the aircraft. With the sun at its current angle, each crack dragged a razor thin rainbow across his vision.

Mr. Barbicane made sure his seat was in its full upright position then placed his hands on the two arm rests and sighed. He closed his eyes and waited to be transformed.

"Mr. Barbicane Takes A Trip" Chapter Five

With his eyes shut, Mr. Barbicane listened to the airplane fill with people. Normally he would take advantage of this seat so forward in the aircraft to watch the peristaltic progress of his fellow travelers. But his experience in the departure area, the inability to see people as individuals, plucked at his mind. He was not so much afraid to look as he thought it wiser not to look. If he opened his eyes and found he could not tell one person from another, if he couldn’t get the right head with the right body, he would surly find it distressing. And if he did, there was nothing he could do about it. If he said something…well, what could he possibly say? How could he possibly explain what was happening? Not that anything was happening. He was just having a little trouble being able to tell people apart. What would he get out of informing the cabin attendant of his perceptual difficulty? She might think he was ill and they would have to take him of the plane, they would prevent him from leaving and that’s the last thing he wanted.

So he stayed quietly in his seat listening to the people pass by, feeling the change of shadow across him as they blocked and cleared the windows on the other side of the cabin.

There was nothing wrong. Whatever it was…and it wasn’t anything, really…was something along the lines of that ghost slash across his vision, the one the back of his eye picked up through the gap between the steps and the airplane. An optical illusion.

After all, he’d been able to see the faces of the woman at the ticket counter and the woman who checked his boarding pass, and the cabin attendant who’d greeted him when he stepped on board. They were focused, their features were properly placed on their faces, their heads firmly attached to their bodies. He had no problem there. It was his fellow passengers he was having trouble with.

He felt someone slip into the aisle seat next to him. He heard the person exhale as they leaned forward to put something under the seat in front of them and knew from the quality of the sigh that he was now seated next to a woman. He kept his eyes closed.

Mr. Barbicane had crossed the nation several times without exchanging a single word with the person sitting next to him. He respected their privacy and expected a reciprocal indifference.

After several minutes the sounds coming from the people snaking their way to the back of the aircraft diminished and a cabin attendant came on the public address system reminding all within the sound of her voice about the federal regulations requiring everyone to be in their seat before the plane could be pushed back into the taxiway. She then requested that everyone on board direct their attention to the front of the cabin.

Mr. Barbicane did as he was told, opening his eyes and looking straight ahead to watch one of the cabin attendants act out the instructions heard over the small speaker above his head. He watched her hold up a card on which all exits from the MD-87 were clearly marked and that a path to these exits would be delineated by a light strip imbedded in the cabin floor. He was shown how to operate a seat-belt and what to do with the yellow oxygen mask which would drop down from a panel in the unlikely event of a loss of cabin pressure.

He kept his eyes on the woman demonstrating the safety measures. He felt she deserved at least that much. All around him were the sounds of people settling in their seats, finishing cell phone conversations, preparing paperwork or reading material, blasé in their disregard for this important information. Perhaps someday those people will pay a heavy price for their inattention. Perhaps that day was upon them. Were they hours, perhaps minutes away from cursing themselves for not listening as they struggled with their seatbelts, the Pacific canting wildly to one side beyond the window as they desperately tried to remember if their lifejacket was in a packet in the seatback in front of them or if their seat cushion itself was to be used as a floatation device? Disrespectful fools. They were the authors of their own fate as far as Mr. Barbicane was concerned, and would receive no sympathy from him. For he alone among them would know that even though oxygen was flowing into the mask, the plastic bag would not inflate.

The announcement was completed with the promise of beverage service once the aircraft had reached its cruising altitude of thirty-five thousand feet. Soft drinks, water, and juice were free while there was a nominal charge for wine and beer. Exact change was always appreciated. In first class, Mr. Barbicane knew whatever beverage he chose would be free, regardless of its alcoholic content.

There was a slight jerk, a shudder through the length of the machine as the tractor attached to the nose gear backed the aircraft away from the terminal building and into the taxiway. A pause while the tractor was detached then the throttles of both engines were gently advanced and the turbines behind him surged slightly in order to overcome the inertial bulk of all those people and bags and fuel and metal and the aircraft moved forward under its own power for the first time since Mr. Barbicane stepped on board.

Clear of the terminal, the aircraft started rolling along the parking lot perimeter to the end of the longer of the airport’s two runways, 15/33, which runs essentially north and south and has a length of six thousand eight hundred and eighty-six feet and a width of one hundred and fifty feet. It has a surface of grooved concrete and, when used in the 15 configuration, i.e. taking-off to the south, the heading is 152 magnetic, 167 true.

The aircraft lumbered along the taxi way, its wingtip almost even with the chain link fence that guarded the budget parking lot where Mr. Barbicane parked his car before boarding the shuttle to the terminal. He saw the Number Eight shuttle stop he used and then, to his amazement, he saw his car. It was a starling coincidence and he almost waved to his car as he passed. He wondered if this sighting had any meaning. Certainly it wasn’t a bad thing to see one’s car before departing. Therefore he decided to take it as an exceptionally good omen.

The airplane reached the end of the taxiway and made a slow arc of a turn to bring it around to the foot of the runway. They reached that point, apparently already cleared for departure, because once the pilot had the nose of the aircraft centered on the runway, the throttles were fully applied and the machine charged down the concrete, picking up speed and pressing Mr. Barbicane gently back against his seat.

The parking lot streaked by on the wrong side of the plane for him to even attempt to pick out his car. Then the terminal went by. Then the nose of the plane started to lift.

Mr. Barbicane did not feel the exact moment the main gear lost touch with the runway. He never did and this surprised him. He couldn’t understand why such a profound event wasn’t accompanied by an appropriate acknowledgement. A sound, a light, perhaps a visible tentacle of gravity snapping clear of the undercarriage as the aircraft escaped. But there was no such delineation and he had to guess at the moment, never guessing right, always off by a few seconds, only knowing for sure as the landscape all around dropped below the plane as it climbed and started to bank which is what the aircraft did now.

Mr. Barbicane was no longer in physical contact with the planet Earth. He had been removed from the surface and all that was left behind was circumstantial evidence of his existence; his car, his home, his other worldly goods. You might deduce their owner from the fact of their existence, but you couldn’t really make the leap to saying for sure there really was an owner. You couldn’t, without fear of contradiction, state unequivocally that there really was someone named Mr. Barbicane and this was his hat and these are the checks he wrote and this is what was left of the bottle of mouthwash he put in the medicine cabinet next to the razor he used yesterday. You might locate people who claim to have seen him. Possibly saw him in the market, purchasing the mouthwash and razor you found in the medicine cabinet. And those people might believe they had seen him…not that anyone ever took note of him in the market or anywhere else for that matter. There were dribs and drabs and the vague suggestion of a rumor that a Mr. Barbicane walked the Earth. But in that moment, as he was in the process of being subsumed into the firmament, the Mr. Barbicane in question did not walk among mortal men. And you really couldn’t prove it.

In this sense, Mr. Barbicane, when aloft, was very much like God.

"Mr. Barbicane Takes A Trip" Chapter Six

Mr. Barbicane savored his assent. He looked down at the retreating Earth and, although he knew such a thing was unlikely, felt he could actually detect a diminishing of the gravitational pull of the receding planet. He felt this at the base of his brain and across his chest. He could almost feel himself rising slightly in his seat, the belt tightening across his lap.

Outside the small window cars and streets and people dropped away, lost their details, their reality, their ability to affect him. The landing gear retracted into the body of the aircraft with a straining hydraulic whine and the solid shutting of metal doors. Flaps were pulled back into the trailing edge of the wings and they all continued upward, no longer banking, but still climbing. Climbing out of the valley that now could be seen to be covered with a thin brown layer of trapped air.

Higher still, through the first thin clouds then the great white layer of overcast which, when pierced, looked to Mr. Barbicane like an Brobdignagian version of the cotton used to decorate communities of miniature houses established under Christmas trees and around mirrors on the dining room tables of old women who arranged the tiny figures of skaters, figures made out of lead and handpainted in their childhood.

These arrangements were fussed over for hours every December by the old women who were filled with the anticipation of delighted children who would visit during the holidays. The children rarely came and if they did it was with the familiar reluctance of children to visit the old. They came for gifts and candy and took no joy in the intricate display set out on the dining room table, the frozen lake mirror, the skating figures, the mounds of whipped cotton representing snow, the small cardboard houses and pipe-cleaner trees, disproportionate toy cars and perhaps a sled. It was motionless and therefore of no value to a child. Its lack on animation was just another reason to dislike these forced visits. And being children they did nothing to hide their irritation. They were rude and hurtful and when their rudeness and hurtfulness was pointed out to them they would shrug, compounding their sins with indifference.

But really, he thought, they are not so much rude and hurtful and indifferent as they are afraid. They are afraid of people closer to death than they are and they know the older you get the closer you are to the end. They are primitives in this terror; cute little cavemen and cavewomen made hysterical by the approach of someone who, sooner than the person would want, would be as dead and motionless as the lead figures she has arranged on the mirror on her dining room table. They are grimy little monsters, inarticulate, selfish, sociopathic, snatching her candy and toys then skulking by the door waiting for the grown-ups who forced them to come here to finish their stupid tribute to this old and therefore useless creature, so they can leave, so they can finally just go and take them away from this lavender scented house of death with its drawn curtains and dark corners and no television to look at, just pictures of people all ready dead and therefore of no use to anyone.

Perhaps it is because children have so recently become aware of being alive that they fear death more than the rest of us.

Their irritating complaints will eventually erode the will of the grown-ups who brought them and they will all leave. And the old woman will be left in the quiet house which has seen so many withdrawals, more and more as the time goes, and at a disturbingly accelerating rate now. She loves the children and the life they represent and is sorry they can’t see her as anything but the source of boredom and sugar. But she also recognizes their cruelty and monstrous nature. They are ugly little proto-people without grace or wisdom. They should be moved through this childhood period as rapidly as possible so that they can become something of value. Until such time they should be instructed to shut-up and informed that they are really very stupid little creatures whose opinion is not sought or appreciated.

This, of course, is not the prevailing opinion in the nation where Mr. Barbicane resided. In fact, for some reason, the prevailing opinion is the exact reverse of what commonsense would dictate. In Mr. Barbicane’s world, there is an assumption that these little monsters should be serviced continually and that their strident whims should become the basis for the entire culture. Another reason why Mr. Barbicane so liked to detach himself from the planet now hidden by clouds.

It was at this point the pilot came on the public address system and welcomed the passengers. Prior to this announcement, the pilot always remains mute, buffered from his charges by the co-pilot, cabin attendants and ground-based crew. But once in the air, once in his true and unchallenged domain, the pilot spoke to Mr. Barbicane and the others with a firm if disinterested male voice that spoke to altitude and weather conditions and the estimated time of their arrival and what they might expect to find there. He completed his speech by acknowledging the fact that the people in the passenger cabin had a choice in air carriers and expressing his gratitude as well as the gratitude of the airline itself that they had made the series of choices leading to their trusting their lives to this organization and this crew of highly trained professionals in particular. If there was anything a passenger thought they needed to make their journey more comfortable, that person should not hesitate to communicate those needs to a cabin attendant.

All was preceding well. Mr. Barbicane grew increasingly confident in his status as passenger. The airport had been negotiated, there had been no problems with his ticket, not mechanical problems with the plane or meteorological difficulties along the projected route, nothing to send him back into the nightmare of re-booking and re-scheduling. The take-off had been perfect, the climb and leveling, all perfection.

Now began the core of the flight, the patient waiting in a comfortable seated position while the machine around him transported Mr. Barbicane through the lower atmosphere surrounded as he was by travelers of all sorts and missions.

The only problem…no, problem was much too serious a label. The only point of concern…and even that was too strong a word. The only tick Mr. Barbicane was willing to admit to was the, he was sure, transitory inability to bring into focus his fellow travelers; the problem…alright, call it a problem…of not being able to distinguish them, to see them properly and keep them focused in his mind as individuals.

He decided to use the next few minutes of the flight to experiment. He would look at the woman seated next to him. He usually avoided doing this, kept his eyes directed out the window or down at his tray of food or the pages of a book or, on long flights when the cabin was darkened and video entertainment provided, looking over the seatback in front of him to the screen at the front of the cabin, watching the various programs. He never listened to these show, he only watched. He much preferred the powerful white noise of the cabin pressure and the vibration of the engines to the soundtrack of the various presentations. He would watch the tiny actors as if they were performers in a cunningly detailed puppet theatre. The motives of the miniature figures were not as interesting as the casual ballet of their actions.

But there would be no film entertainment on this flight due to its comparatively short duration. Besides, he had made the decision to see if he could differentiate the person sitting next to him.

Mr. Barbicane looked down at his feet then started to turn his head to the left, very slowly, a few degrees at a time until some part of the passenger at his side came into his field of vision. This happened and he almost gasped when he realized what he was looking at.

What he saw, extended under the seat was a bare female leg. Next to it a second leg. The feet were almost bare, wearing flat sandals consisting of little more than a sole and two narrow straps the reached back over each foot from between the great and second toe. The nails were painted a dark grape color. The skin was not tanned, but not pale. The legs were trim, neither flaccid nor grotesquely muscled. These were the legs of a young woman wearing a pair of pale yellow shorts. Not running shorts, but the sort hikers wear, very short, but with a cuff and multiple pockets and loops. She also wore a fanny-pack sort of pouch. Mr. Barbicane turned his head a little more, still looking down and saw that above the waist of the shorts was the beginning of a ribbed t-shirt of a thin oatmeal colored fabric. He could now see the young woman’s bare arm now and the rise of her breasts above the scoop of the t-shirt.

After the sudden and inexplicable shock of first seeing that bare leg, Mr. Barbicane was relieved that he was able to maintain the various body parts in a proper continuity; that the legs were where legs should be and the shoulders lead to arms and the arms lead to hands holding a thick magazine filled with pictures of heavily made up women with expressions suggesting a vapid confusion and apparent unawareness of their location or how they came to be there. He wanted to look at her profile, at her face, to make sure everything was all right there, that there hadn’t been some distressing cubistic rearrangement. But he really couldn’t do that, he really couldn’t just turn and look at her, without the very real risk of her looking back. There was the very real danger of eye contact, problematic all by itself, but happening this early in the flight there was the possibility of Mr. Barbicane being completely undone. He would wait to try to look at her face. Perhaps during drink service, while the cabin attendants were in the aisles. He could look then, see at least the side of her head and take it from there.

That determined, Mr. Barbicane was struck with the realization of just how much of the young lady’s body was available for him to look at. Between the legs and the bare arms and the cut of the shirt, the vast majority of her surface was on display. This amazed him. Not that he was a prude. He was amazed at the mind set that would permit someone to go out in such a state.

Imagine. Being not only not repulsed by the sight of your own body, but being able to expose so much of it to the world. What must that be like? What would you feel in the morning, looking in the mirror? Would you identify with the person looking back at you? What about in the shower? What would a shower be like if you looked like the woman in the seat next to him? A shower was something utilitarian, a period of unavoidable nakedness and self-awareness that needed to be kept to as short a time as practical. But if you looked like that and you were aware that you looked like that and could actually derive some aesthetic pleasure out of how your body looked and, he reasoned, felt…what would that do to the concept of taking a shower? Suddenly a shower takes on an aspect of ritual, one filled with gratitude.

How conscious was the choice to leave her house, to step out into the world wearing shorts and a t-shirt? Certainly there was comfort. There was probably at least some pride. Satisfaction? Entitlement? Were the choices of clothing made based on who she was leaving or based on who she would find at the other end of the trip? Was it about the person taking you to the airport, or the person waiting to pick you up at the other airport? Was this the promise made during the shower? I will go out into the world as myself and let the world enjoy what I have enjoyed in my own home, in my own mirror. I exist and you can see that I exist and isn’t that the most pleasant thing to contemplate for both of us?

Or was their no consciousness at all. Perhaps it never occurred to her that any real decision needed to be made, at least any decision beyond comfort. It didn’t matter to her. She stepped out into the world without concern for the opinion or judgment of others. They had no power to judge her with look or word.

Mr. Barbicane felt old beyond his years. He felt dusted with his own dead skin. If he moved, parts of him would flake away to be pulled into the air circulating system to be filtered and reintroduced to the cabin environment where, perhaps, in one breath, traces of him would be pulled into the lungs of the woman at his side. A ghostly remnant of him might be transported by a sigh, deep into the body next to him, there to cling to the side of an alveoli until dislodged again and coughed out, expulsed. The essence of Mr. Barbicane finally coming to rest in a ball of pink tissue for disposal later.

He was lifted from this contemplation by a cabin attendant leaning over him and asking what, if any, beverage he would like.

"Mr. Barbicane Takes A Trip" Chapter Seven

With his auxiliary bag lunch in the pocket of the seat pocket in front of him, Mr. Barbicane happily contemplated his first class entrée, a gift given only to the handful of people in the forward cabin. He had selected the Chicken Breast Italiano served on a bed of fettuccini noodles with a small side salad, roll and a can of Diet Coke. He had decided against the Fiesta Shrimp Kabob and the Lite Snack Cheese Plate.

The chicken breast, grilled with a topping of “Italian” seasonings rested on a confusion of noodles in a rectangular dish of white plastic. A chocolate chip cookie wrapped in clear plastic and a salad, with a small foil packet of creamy Caesar dressing in a slightly deeper dish, were at opposite corners of the plastic tray the cabin attendant put on Mr. Barbicane’s tray table, reaching across the young lady who he had heard to order the Lite Snack Cheese Plate.

There was a time in this great nation of ours when people in the first class cabins of aircraft ate with metal utensils and drank from actual glasses while those who had spent less for their tickets ate with plastic utensils and drank from plastic cups at the rear of the aircraft. Political and religious extremism and nightmarish tragedy have democratized the dining hierarchy on airplanes. Now everyone eats with and drinks from plastic. Plastic is believed to be less lethal than metal although Mr. Barbicane took little comfort in this distinction. The white picnic fork and knife on the tray in front of him added no additional sense of safety or well-being. They served only as another reminder of how, when faced with tragedy, we often come up with the most amazingly wrongheaded reactions.

Mr. Barbicane unwrapped the golden foil around his small Scrabble tile of butter, broke open the surprisingly cold roll, cut off a rectangle of butter with his plastic knife and started to apply it to the roll. Since both roll and butter were very cold spreading was not an easy process. He pressed harder, trying to force the butter to flatten against the soft insides of the roll. But this only managed to compress the airy roll against the inside of the crust. He pressed harder.

Then Mr. Barbican’s hands slipped and the serrated edge of the plastic knife cut across the side of his left index finger just at the first knuckle. There was a startlingly precise lick of pain. His eyes clicked to the left to see if the woman next to him had noticed the slip. But her hands were busy inspecting the contents of her snack plate (several plastic wrapped packets of multigrain crackers, a small plastic tub of pale cheese, a yellow brick of something he assumed was cheddar, a number of grapes and an apple) and nothing in her focused industry indicated she was aware anything had happened to him.

He looked at the site of the injury. Perhaps he hadn’t cut all that deep. Then, after what seemed a remarkably long time, a thin diagonal of red, less than a quarter of an inch in length, appeared at the edge of Mr. Barbicane’s index finger. The line became more distinct then thickened, then glistened as blood made its way to the surface of his skin. He put down the piece of roll he was holding and put the finger to his lips. There wasn’t enough blood to taste. Then Mr. Barbicane took tore off part of his paper napkin and wrapped it around his finger to form an impromptu bandage, holding it in place with his middle finger and putting pressure on the site of the injury with his thumb.

This made the manipulating of his knife and fork slightly more difficult, but not so difficult as to prevent Mr. Barbicane from completing his meal. He set the roll and butter aside and started to cut his chicken into manageable bites. He thought this would permit him to put the knife down and eat the bulk of his meal with his fork only. It did.

He opened the foil package of dressing and squeezed the contents over the small salad of green lettuce, one cherry tomato and four small brown croutons. He then proceeded to alternate, with no real pattern or rhythm to the alternations, between the salad, the chicken and the noodles underneath the chicken. To this rotation he would occasional add a sip of his Diet Coke, a bite of his roll (he had decided against any additional attempts at buttering) and pauses to look out the window at the intense white landscape of clouds. In this fashion, Mr. Barbicane consumed his meal and felt satisfied by it.

When he was finished eating, he put down his plastic knife and fork and carefully took the napkin off his cut finger. The cut was no longer bleeding. Now there was a thread of congealed blood matching the red stain on the napkin he saw when he took it away. It looked and felt like a paper cut. He decided to buy a package of Band-Aids when the plane landed at Dallas-Ft. Worth. This would protect his finger from subsequent injury, help prevent the possibility of infection, and give him something else to do at the airport.

The cut on Mr. Barbicane’s finger was typical of the sort of pain and damage he had experienced so far in life. While his childhood had contained the appropriate illnesses and their associated discomfort, he had broken no bones, experienced no great traumas. His youth was similarly without medical note. Now, as he moved deeper into middle age, he had started to wonder if this eventless life might not be the blessing it first appeared to be. He had experienced little physical pain, no hospital stays or lengthy home confinement. He had needed no procedures or drugs with potential side-effects. Now, all those things lay ahead of him as his life drew closer to its ending. He could fully expect pain and hospitals and drugs and realized he had no preparation for these eventualities. Now, every stubbed toe, every minor cut was not so much an inconvenience as it was a threat, a promise that there was more ahead and that he was completely unprepared for it.

If he’d broken an arm as a boy or perhaps survived a serious automobile accident in his resilient youth, he would have some memory, some physiological context to help him get through what was waiting for him. As unreasonable as it might seem, Mr. Barbicane had started to believe that he had not avoided pain and discomfort so much as he had delayed it, deferred it to a later time and that time would be here sooner than he would wish. Then all the misery he could have averaged out over the years would be delivered to him in one crushing blow at a time when his ability to recover and bounce back was rapidly diminishing.

This contemplation not so much of mortality but of pain and suffering would have been bad enough, but recently it had started to crowd in on the thing that gave Mr. Barbicane so much pleasure. Travel. He had started to consider what might happen if that sudden visitation of cumulative pain were to arrive while he was away from home. What if, while at his happiest, he was struck down?

He tried to keep a cool head about this prospect, but the abstract concept of being “caught” in mid-step by pain was quickly replaced with disturbing fantasies of possible scenarios for the dreaded event. Mr. Barbicane thought about what it would be like to be on board an aircraft, such as the one he was now on, when he was found out and attacked through some agency (perhaps contaminated food or some toxic substance on the plastic cutlery). He had no sense of what real pain felt like and he was terrified he might discover the reality while five miles above the world he so enjoyed leaving. Or what if the attack occurred during a flight over a large body of water? Mr. Barbicane had never flown over an ocean and had no plans to do so in the immediate future, but that didn’t prevent him from considering what might happen if he was caught in some medical vice half-way between two places with no hope of an intermediate stop.

As frightening as the prospect of pain locating him on an airplane in flight was to Mr. Barbicane, he dreaded getting sick alone in a hotel room even more. Even though medical help would surely be more readily accessible to him, the idea of growing ill in a hotel room in a strange city elevated him to a high state of agitation. And this was such a cruel fantasy because he so loved hotel rooms.

Nothing, not even flying, gave him as much pleasure as being in an anonymous hotel room. And to think about being sick and in pain while in one of his beloved rooms…well, the thought itself could arguably bring on the condition imagined. Mr. Barbicane realized he could make himself sick by simply thinking about what it would be like. And he did think about it, more and more it seemed. He did not think of himself as an imaginative man, but the lurid detail in which this particular nightmare presented itself to him were, he thought, beyond the inventive capabilities of his own mind. And by nightmare one shouldn’t assume that these terrors were restricted to Mr. Barbicane’s sleep. Often lately they had started to assemble themselves in his waking mind in those moments when consciousness is unfocused by thought or task. Then, unnoticed at first, the elements of the drama would collect in the mind of its unwilling star.

Mr. Barbicane saw himself in a hotel room, in bed, feeling first uneasy, then uncomfortable. Then he sensed pain, beginning in his stomach (it always began in his stomach when he imagined it) and radiating out. That is to say he sensed what he imagined pain might feel like, but realized he was creating an empty approximation of the thing he feared. Pain, he knew, was indescribable. And if you couldn’t describe it, how could you ever end it?

The imagined pain grows in the imagined Mr. Barbicane. He looks at the clock radio and it is always four a.m. He throws back the covers and sits on the edge of the bed thinking he’ll go to the bathroom in the hope of some magical relief brought about by simply being in the bathroom. He stands, tries to straighten up and can’t. Pain keeps him from standing up straight. He walks, stooped over, around the foot of the bed, past the amoire with the cable television and the mini-bar, past his open suitcase on the rack between the mirrored closet doors and the chest of drawers, to reach the bathroom.

Bathrooms in hotel rooms are not like the bathrooms in homes. The poor ones are grim stalls for hygiene and elimination, the fine ones are places of luxury and conveniences. But neither kind will ever be mistaken for something found in a home.

The imagined Mr. Barbicane steps up to the imagined vanity and mirror and turns on a light. He looks at himself in the mirror and sees his face is colorless and fearful. He takes a glass and fills it from the tap. Then he takes some aspirin from a bottle in his traveling bag and swallows them. The pain grows like something inflating inside him, displacing his organs, pressurizing his blood till it pounds in his head. First he sits on the edge of the tub, then he slides down the side to sit on the floor, then he slowly, very slowly falls to one side and ends up hugging himself on the floor of a bathroom in a hotel room in a strange city.

Perhaps he dies in the hotel room. Mr. Barbicane always manages to stop the fantasy before it goes that far. But every time it conjures itself in his mind, it takes more of his will to stop it. And so many things can start his mind on these unhealthy and unsolicited trajectories. A bottle of aspirin on a counter, the sound of a siren during a quiet night, or the contemplation of an insignificant cut on the side of his finger.

"Mr. Barbicane Takes A Trip" Chapter Eight

Later, Mr. Barbicane was awakened from a mercifully dreamless sleep by a shudder running through the length of the aircraft. He looked out the window and saw that the clouds had grown darker as he crossed the country. There was a mechanical tone amplified over the public address system and the FASTEN SEAT BELTS light was illuminated. A moment later one of the cabin attendants came on the address system to inform the passengers that it was the captain who turned on the light and this was because of unstable weather conditions developing ahead of them.

Mr. Barbicane sighed and looked down. Both his tray table and the tray table of the woman next to him were in their closed and locked position so he could once again see her legs. He could also see a length of white wire running from the iPod clipped to the belt of her shorts, snaking across her thigh then leading up along her chest. She was listening to music. Mr. Barbicane thought this might be a good opportunity to try to look at her, to see if he could hold her features in focus.

Slowly, Mr. Barbicane turned and lifted his head, his eyes following the white string of the earbud chord as it split just above the young woman’s cleavage. He continued to trace the wire closest to him as it climbed toward her face. First he saw her chin and her throat. He could even detect the pulse thrumming through the veins in her neck. Her jaw led him to the side of her head and to the beginning of her hair which was a dark red, streaked with something lighter, and pulled back and up away from her head in a ponytail secured with a loop of green fabric. A wisp of hair tendriled down at the side of her head with carefully designed carelessness. There were two earrings in the earlobe Mr. Barbicane could see. The lower was a dangling diamond shaped object, crusted with red and blue stones and looking not antique but like something that wanted to remind you of an antique. Above this was a simple diamond stud. Her eyes were closed as she listened to the music delivered almost directly to her brain by the tiny speakers inserted in her ears. Her nose was correctly proportioned and had apparently undergone no surgical alteration. He could see the side of her mouth. Her lips were tinted a faint reddish brown sort of color. She was young. Early twenties he guessed, but he was very bad at that sort of thing. Certainly the face he saw was smooth and even, not overly made up, not pulled tight behind the ears.

As Mr. Barbicane watched, the young woman’s lips came apart, her jaw dropping slightly. He imagined he could almost hear the moist snap of the lips separating, but knew that would be impossible. The young woman had fallen asleep listening to her music.

The plane bounced again, but the motion did not wake the young woman. Rather it merely served to lull her head downward and slightly toward Mr. Barbicane. He looked at the sleeping woman and was very happy to see that the elements of her face were in proper relation to each other and showed no signs of shifting or fading as he concentrated on them.

Her mouth remained open and the beam of her reading light caught a drop of saliva on one white lower front incisor creating a pin-point of light as bright as a star. Mr. Barbicane found he neither wanted to look away nor did he expect to find he was capable of looking away from the small point of light set between the young woman’s lips even if he tried.

He knew she could wake up at any moment and find him looking at her face, at her mouth in particular, but still he would not or could not look away. And, with each passing second, as the likelihood of her waking and seeing him looking at her grew, an unfamiliar and giddy sense of excitement blossomed in Mr. Barbicane’s heart. He’d never experienced anything like it. It seemed wicked for some reason, but, if pressed, he could not say why it seemed so wicked. And it seemed terrible forward of him. Worse than forward: Bold.

To continue looking was folly, unquestionable folly. But still he looked and still the bubble of wicked pleasure nervously grew to fill his chest.

He began to bargain with himself. I will look until the star goes out, he thought. He would continue to look at her face, at the skin covering her eyes, at the thin brows like the narrow wings of some impossibly small seabird, until she closed her mouth or moved or something else happened to disturb the arrangement that caused the light to shiny from her tooth. If she woke and saw him, it was out of his hands.

Her chest rose and fell gently, moving the wires of her earbuds, and Mr. Barbicane wondered what music was playing to entertain her sleeping mind.

"Mr. Barbicane Takes A Trip" Chapter Nine

She had fallen asleep during the Andante of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto in A minor for Violin and Orchestra, BWV 1041. The beginning of the andante sounds like you’ve joined in a long climb up a hill. It didn’t seem so steep at the beginning of the walk, in fact it isn’t really terribly steep, but the rise is continuous and the distance to the top of the hill is longer than you expected. So the orchestra seems to be taking weary steps as you listen. They and you have grown very tired during a journey that was not supposed to require so much work. You were simply walking and you saw a hill and there might be trees at the top of the hill or a single tree. A single cherry tree white with blossoms so white they couldn’t possibly be real and you started walking up to the hill, toward this impossible tree at the crest, white blossoms against a blue sky, the landscape beyond the crest unknown to you. And you start to climb, climbing up the hill, looking down at the ground as you climb, sometimes looking up at the tree. Your breathing starts to reflect the unanticipated effort and after a few minutes you realize the hill is steeper than you think and maybe this wasn’t such a good idea and you might as well turn around and head back down before you go too far and you’re probably late anyway.

Then the solo violin arrives with one of those clear, simple, profound melodies of Bach’s as if to encourage the rest of the instruments that the struggle is worth the effort and the top of the hill is worth attaining. And the orchestra responds to this. There’s renewed effort after the first violin passage as they push on to the top of the hill. The violin returns again, encouraging, promising, leading. And each time it does, the rest of the instruments draw something from the encouragement and push on. The movement is made up of these alternating passages of effort and promise, struggle and assurance, leading you up a hill. Bach pulls you along, toward the top, toward the cherry tree with its crown of blossoms that must be made of tissue paper because nothing in nature could be that white. Somewhere in your mind you realize Bach is long dead, that the music that’s calling to you is almost three hundred years old and that Bach was only thirty-two when he wrote it and what the hell did you do at thirty-two that could survive three centuries? And still you climb the hill. The music won’t let you do anything else.

But the dream the young woman was having had nothing to do with Bach. The parts of her brain listening to the music were not in communication with the parts producing the dream.

In the dream she was standing in front of the movie theaters up at Universal City Walk waiting for her father. This was odd because she hated going to the movies up at City Walk and because her father was dead. But dreams exist outside logic, or else they have their own logic which states that since a thing is happening it can’t be impossible so you better get with the program.

She stands there in the middle of all the lights and sound, the bad music blasting out from the giant television screen on which is projected a music video almost in sync with the music pouring out of the speakers. She hates this place. She had her ass grabbed in a crowd outside Gladstone’s in this place. And somebody once tried to steal her purse. Why would her father want to go to the movies here?

Her father shows up and he looks the way he did when she was a little girl, when she watched him march in the veteran’s parade down the middle of Maple Avenue. She was proud of him, of the ribbons and decorations on his jacket, proud of his veteran’s cap. Much later that night he came home drunk and pounded around the first floor of the house and scared her so much that she tried to pull the table next to her bed in front of the door, but that only managed to knock her lamp that had a carrousel for a base off the table. It fell to the floor and the carrousel broke and the noise was enough to bring her father stumbling up the stairs and she tried to keep him out, she was so afraid of him, she’d never heard him really drunk before and he really didn’t get drunk often, but there’d been a big blow out at the volunteer firehouse after the parade. She got in bed and pulled the covers over her and started to cry. Her father came in and asked what she was crying about, but she was too scared to answer. Then he saw the broken lamp on the floor and imagined that was what she was crying about. He leaned down and scooped up the parts of the broken lamp in his hands and stood. He stood there, weaving, still very drunk, with the pieces of the broken lamp in his hands and telling her to stop crying because he would fix it. He’d fix the lamp and everything would be okay. And as he said this, pieces of the lamp were falling and hitting the floor and breaking into smaller and smaller pieces and even drunk he knew repairing this lamp was something he probably couldn’t do. He just wanted her to stop crying.

He was wearing his veteran’s cap as he came through the crowd at City Walk and went to her and hugged her and told her he was sorry he was late. It wasn’t that he hadn’t died. They both knew he was dead, but now he was back and that seemed perfectly normal.

Rory was by the box office windows. He had their tickets and told them they had to hurry because they were late. Rory put his arm around her and kissed her harder than he should have kissed her in front of her father, but her father didn’t say anything and Rory didn’t say anything and the three of them went into the theater and found the auditorium they were looking for and went inside.

The inside was not like the real inside of the theaters at City Walk. Those theaters didn’t have balconies, but this theater did and they sat in the front row of the balcony. The lights were already down and the movie had already started. It was a movie she wanted Rory and her father to see. It was one of her favorite movies, but she didn’t recognize any of what was on the screen.

On screen people were on a very large airplane with no roof. The airplane was open on top, like a big old London bus, flying through the sky. She recognized some of the people on the airplane as the actors from her favorite movie and assumed that this must have been how the actors arrived to be in the movie and she’d just never seen this part before. She had a copy of the movie on DVD but she’d never seen this scene before. She turned to explain this to her father and Rory and that’s when she saw that her boyfriend and her father were kissing. On the mouth.

Rory, who was seated next to her, was twisted around in his seat and he was kissing her father and her father was kissing Rory back. Her father had one arm around Rory and his other hand cradling the back of Rory’s neck and Rory had one arm around her father’s shoulders and the other hand between her father’s legs. And they were doing this right in front of her, right in front of all the people in the balcony and there were suddenly lots of people in the balcony and the lights were on. The movie was playing, but the lights were on so everybody could see what was happening. And the thing that bothered her wasn’t that her father was kissing a man, it’s that he was kissing her boyfriend.

She told Rory to stop, but he acted like he didn’t hear her. He didn’t stop kissing her father, he just got more into it. She watched Rory move out of his seat, all the time keeping a lip-lock on her father, and turn to face the other man, getting down on his knees in front of the other man, getting between his open legs. Rory and her father held each other’s face in their hands and kissed with an ardor she’d never seen before. It was so intense that, in spite of who she was looking at, she realized she was getting a little turned on by the situation which, even in the context of a dream struck her as pushing the limits of acceptable behavior.

Then things got weird. She felt that sexual warmth growing in her and that was familiar enough, but then she felt something she never felt before which was a sense of growth between her own legs. A sense of some part of her filling with blood and taking on weight and dimension. She knew what this was even though she knew it was impossible. There was no question that she now had a penis and that it was becoming profoundly erect. She looked down and could actually see the shape of it growing down the inside of the leg of her jeans, pressed against her inner thigh. She didn’t want people to catch her looking at what was happening to her so she looked up, at the screen.

But what was on the screen was what was going on in the balcony. Up on the screen she was sitting in her seat, her hands grasping the arm rests. She pulled her knees shut to hide what was happening, but that just made things feel…interesting. She closed her eyes and concentrated on keeping her hands on the arm rests. If she took her hands off the arm rests she wasn’t sure she could control where they’d end up and frankly she found the situation complicated enough just the way it was.

The thing about dreams is that they’re irrefutable while you’re in them. Common sense would dictate that she had not in fact suddenly acquired a penis, but common sense holds no sway in dreams and the realization that it was impossible for her to have a penis is overwhelmed by the seemingly practical questions of what would her life be like now that she had one.

What would she do? How would she live? How would she explain this to Rory? Rory who was at that minute continuing to deeply French her father. And people were looking at her. Oh, God. Everybody was looking at her.

Now there was a trembling, a shaking. At first she thought it was something else happening to her body, that the vibration was coming from her. Then she realized the rumbling, the shaking was coming up through the bottom of the seat and through her and she knew with that certainty you know things in dreams that the balcony was about to collapse.

And through this confusion, the humiliating betrayal by her boyfriend surpassed only by the betrayal of her own body, rose familiar music which, after a moment, she recognized as “Sheep May Safely Graze,” a Bach cantata she loved and kept in a power rotation on her iPod. The music was not from outside, not from the theater, but was inside her head and with that realization the terror drained out of her, drained down along her legs, through her feet and out of her body. Bach was coming to her rescue again as he had so often in the past. He would protect her from whatever was going on and save her.

Sweeter and more dependable than God was Johann.

Safe in the hands of Bach, the dream retreated and she opened her eyes, just as the man in the seat next to her turned to look out his window at the clouds that had darkened and turned to lead while she was asleep.

"Mr. Barbicane Takes A Trip" Chapter Ten

Mr. Barbicane had assumed the young woman was having a dream and that something in the dream was disturbing her. She shifted in her seat and pulled her legs together. Then she closed her mouth and the small star blinked out and he had won is little game and could look away. As he did he realized she was waking, opening her eyes, but she did not catch him looking at her. There would be no need for conversation.

He looked out at the sky. They were flying into the afternoon now, losing hours as they went, and the sun was far behind them and traveling in the opposite direction. The further east they went, the darker the clouds became and the darkness came from something other than the absence of light. They were becoming more compressed, more solid, boiling up in their path as they started their initial decent into the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, a place famous for its thunder storms.

As the young woman next to him took out her earbuds, unclipped the iPod from her belt and wrapped the white wires around the small pink machine, the pilot came back on the public address system to inform them they would be passing through some “shower activity” as they dipped lower and lower on the approach to the airport and that there was the possibility of some turbulence. The time had come for the passengers to remain seated for the duration of the flight as the cabin attendants set to collecting the last of the service items and generally preparing the cabin for landing.

Mr. Barbicane checked his seatback and seatbelt then turned again to the window. The aircraft dropped below a floor of clouds the color snow takes on in the gutters of large cities two days after a storm.

Beneath the layer of old snow was a landscape of boiling gray mountains. The plane shuddered and rain smeared horizontally across the outer window. The cabin was filled with the thick green light of a thunderstorm, that late summer artificial twilight.

Mr. Barbicane had once been on a plane landing at this very airport when it was struck by lightning, a common occurrence in the region. It felt to those on board as if the side of the aircraft had been struck by a large pick-up truck going in excess of sixty miles an hour. But the sound of the collision was not followed by any indicators that the aircraft was in trouble. It never lost trim or power and continued on its steady decent. No masks dropped from overhead compartments, no cabin attendants charged through the aisles collecting shoes and eyeglasses. The passengers, Mr. Barbicane included, found themselves in a momentary condition of suspended emotion, wondering if they should go ahead and panic or if that would only end up a terrible embarrassment. He felt the cabin around him was filled with people who had filled their lungs in anticipation of a scream, but now wondered if they should let rip or await further developments one way or the other.

A moment and the co-pilot of the struck aircraft came on the public address system and stated, quite calmly, that the plane had indeed been struck by lightning, that the charge had been dissipated over the metal skin of the aircraft and that all was well.

With which some three hundred people exhaled. Mr. Barbicane found the experience exhilarating. His fear was of pain, not death or any addendum panic.

Outside the window it grew increasingly darker than the four o’clock local time would suggest.

As Mr. Barbicane watched the individual tears slide laterally across the window, the aircraft sank below the immediate layer of the storm. In the distance the horizon was a narrow band of bright gray, light caught between the clouds and the ground. They were getting slightly ahead of the storm as they dropped closer and closer to the ground and the familiar airport indicators of track houses, flat industrial buildings and then massive rent-a-car parking lots came into view.

The thunk of the landing gear doors opening and the whine of the gear’s hydraulic progress vibrated up from the cabin floor and into Mr. Barbicane’s feet. They crossed the last loop of access road, then the blast fence, then he watched the rain slick runway rise up to meet the aircraft.

When all three landing gear clusters were on the ground the pilot reversed thrust and Mr. Barbicane felt himself gently pulled forward by inertia. He had returned to the planet, but he was still a passenger.

"Mr. Barbicane Takes A Trip" Chapter Eleven

While the senior cabin attendant took the opportunity to be the first to welcome Mr. Barbicane and the other passengers to the Dallas-Ft. Worth area and remind them that this was a particularly expansive airport and therefore it would take the pilot considerable time to reach the gate and until that time, until the moment when the nose of the plane was tucked into place and the segmented corridor of the jet way was secured and the canopy folded over the top of the aircraft and the door was about to be open, Mr. Barbicane and his fellow travelers were asked, no, stronger than asked, requested, for their own safety, to stay seated with their seatbelts in place, while this mixture of welcome and warning came through the public address speakers, bringing with it the additional caveat that even once the aircraft had stopped and the light had been turned off and all would be free to stand and reclaim their luggage, even then care should be taken in opening overhead compartment in which items may have shifted during flight, Mr. Barbicane continued to look out his window.

Out there the lights of the various airplanes, luggage tractors, security vehicles, gas trucks, the lights of the runways themselves, were echoed by vertical smears in the wet pavement of the taxiway. Beyond the airport he could see the horizon compressing, squeezing down against the Earth as the thunderstorm he’d just passed through closed in on the airport. There were stuttering eruptions of white light within the clouds and the thin strikes of lightning that actually managed to escape the storm and lance down were impossibly bright, and seemed, at this distance, no thicker than the width of the cut on the side of Mr. Barbicane’s index finger.

While he had arrived, he had not arrived at his final destination so the immunity of his status as traveler was undiminished. He was a citizen of Airportia with all the rights and privileges associated with that status. He could move with absolute freedom within in the airport, having already passed security and having no plans to go outside the warmth of the secure sections of the terminal. Coffee and a snack were waiting for him. A small, albeit overpriced, package of band-aids was waiting for him, untold magazines and the great tidal surge of his fellow citizens working their way from one coded door to the next, going from arrival to departing, going from A-36 to C-19. Moving not from place to place, but from one set of coordinates to another set. Navigating the polished floors and flat carpeted landscape, usually covered by a roof which seems not attached to the building, but floating above it, letting light in at the sides.

Few things in life pleased Mr. Barbicane more than walking with his bag from one gate to another in an airport in a city he would see only in pleasant pictures affixed to the walls of the corridors he transversed. These pictures were meant to communicate the wonders of the particular city, how it was a place of industry and entertainment, commerce and relaxation, that the place was both modern yet rooted in the solid tradition of history. There was usually a night photo of the cityscape with its tall buildings punctured by lights. There was always a photograph of two people, a man and a woman, the man in a suit and tie, the woman in a red dress, seated at a table in a restaurant with a candle set between them, the candle flame caught in some sort of filter that split its light along two axis like the traditional depiction of the ornament on the top of a Christmas tree. In this photo the woman is always holding a glass of wine and she is always laughing. There would also be a photo of a meeting taking place during daylight in one of the skyscrapers depicted in the night shot. In that photo a group of people, both men and women, people of all ethic backgrounds, none of them old, sat at a long table placed against floor to ceiling windows overlooking the city while one of their number stood by a chart on an easel and pointed at positive information on a graph. There would be photographs of families with children engaged in some of the many recreational opportunities afforded within easy reach of the places of commerce. Sometimes these recreational opportunities were of an outdoor, natural sort. Sometimes they indicated that a large amusement complex was located near by.

While the intent of these photographs was to differentiate the glories of one city from another, Mr. Barbicane took great comfort in their uniformity. They wanted him to know that America had ceased to be a threatening amalgam of difference and conflicting opinion. It was now a place of coherent thought, directed toward industry and pleasure. What particular regional difference there might be had been contained and focused, made familiar and safe. He had never seen any of the cities he saw depicted in these murals that graced the hallways of Airportia. Perhaps they were all the same city. Perhaps they were no city at all. Perhaps the models in the photographs were selected for their attractive looks and ability to communicate comfort and were photographed without knowing where it was their faces were being used or to what civic purpose, photographed in some general location that could be made to look like different cities, subtly different cities, always familiar in their subtly difference.

Some might consider this blandness and take offense. Mr. Barbicane did not. He saw it as a restful leveling off of America, a smoothing of differences. They represented less an actual city and more of the ideal of a city. A traveler who never crossed the security line, never claimed his or her baggage and took a cab into the heart of the place, there to do business or seek pleasure, would look at these pictures and take away the reassuring knowledge or at least the reassuring believe that somewhere the difficulties of American cities had been resolved and citizens lived in harmony. There was the potential of happiness anywhere because happiness had been attained here…wherever here might be. Such a traveler might leave the airport of the city he never visited with a sense of nostalgia, possibly longing for the things seen only in the large, bright photographs, usually in the form of tremendous transparencies illuminated from behind. He would remember what he didn’t see and, perhaps, in time, forget that he hadn’t actually seen them. They would then move from the memory of seeing a photograph to the memory of the thing photographed. As one ages, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the difference between the two, and the value of being able to make such a distinction is arguable at best.

A man in a yellow rain slicker with a hood and pants of the same water repellant material came into Mr. Barbicane’s view as the plane turned down the wide alley between two terminal fingers. The man held a flashlight in each hand, the end of which was extended by a plastic cylinder that glowed an imperative red. He used these two frozen torches to direct the aircraft into a second turn which left it facing the terminal finger. Gestures were made with the flashlights as the airplane slowed then stopped. The guardian angel then approached the plane and was lost from Mr. Barbicane’s sight. The last he saw of him he was ducking down to walk under the belly of the machine.

There was a bump as the jet way nuzzled the forward cabin door. Then the pilot turned off the FASTEN SEATBELT light and Mr. Barbicane lifted the face of the buckle to release the apparatus that had held him as he flew.

"Mr. Barbicane Takes A Trip" Chapter Twelve

The aisle quickly filled with passengers anxious to leave the plane. Mr. Barbicane remained in his seat. He reached forward and took his complimentary meal bag from the seat pocket in front of him. The woman next to him stood and opened the overhead bin from which she pulled a bag he couldn’t see from this angle. The cabin door was opened and the passengers started filing out the jet way. He pretended to focus on the list of contents in his lunch bag…a croissant turkey sandwich with low-fat mayonnaise, a cheese-snax, another chocolate chip cookie, and an apple…until the young woman had folded herself into the march of passengers and was well on her way out of the plane.

Mr. Barbicane looked up as she walked away. He saw her back and her neck and watched as she shouldered her carry on bag and reached back with both hands to tighten the fabric securing her ponytail. She turned at the forward galley and left the plane and Mr. Barbicane never saw her again.

He was therefore unaware of the argument she had in the car with her boyfriend Rory who had driven in the rain to meet her on the other side of security. Rory was very happy to see her, but thought he could tell from her expression that she was upset by something. He asked her if the flight had been all right and she said it had she was just tired and she just wanted to get going. He tried to take her bag, but she wouldn’t let him have it.

The couple did not speak as they made their way out of the terminal and across the access road to one of the short term parking lots. Rory kept glancing over, to look at the side of her face, to try to get some sense of what was going on in her mind. But all he saw when he looked was her profile, as pretty as always, but disturbingly set. He’d seen this look before and it was usually brought about by some thoughtless blunder on his part. He was at a loss now. He hadn’t seen her in two weeks, but they spoke on the phone every day and emailed each other more often than that. All conversations and messages had been pleasant and she said she was looking forward to getting on a plane and seeing him and he had gone out of his way to get to the airport on time, leaving extra early, cutting out of the office dangerously early because he didn’t want the weather to delay him.

Now, she showed every indication of being angry at him and he had done nothing. This, he realized, was the only irritating thing about her character he could single out; the way she put him on edge about his behavior, the way she was ready to punish him for something he did or said or seemed to be saying or probably wanted to do or say.

She threw her bag into the back of his car and climbed into the passenger seat, still not talking. He got behind the wheel and drove the leased Mercedes convertible through the maze of the parking structure, paid at the gate and eased onto the loop road that would take them to the expressway. And all through this she was silent. He knew she was angry just as much as he knew, for certain this time, that he had done nothing to merit that anger.

He reached over and put his right hand on her left thigh. She said nothing. All right. Then he started to ease his hand along the curve and moving it upward, finally slipping his hand between her thighs, along the inner seam of her jeans.

That’s when she said, “Don’t.”

He left his hand there. She said “Don’t” again and started to cross her legs. He pulled his hand away.

Out of the corner of her eye he saw her cross her legs then uncross them and cross them the other way, tucking herself against the car door. He saw her put her hands on her thighs and then move them away as if burned. He watched her slide her hands under her legs and sit on them.

He had no idea what was going on inside her head at that moment. And if he did, it would have only served to confuse him further.