Horror Stories

by Liz Phair

  I have no business being out here in the middle of the night by myself, walking foolishly into the jaws of a massive blizzard. I mean, it’s crazy. It’s nuts. I’m determined to make it back to my hotel, convinced that I can catch my scheduled flight out of LaGuardia in the morning, despite the fact that four out of the five regional airports are closed due to gusting winds and whiteout conditions. There’s no rational basis for my conviction. I’m driven by pure, blind stubbornness.

  I stop dead in my tracks, a tiny figure in the middle of a six-way intersection. There it is: the Flatiron Building. I immediately recognize its distinctive wedge shape, a wedding-cake slice in a world of rectangular pasta boxes. I look all the way up, taking in its sheer size, its commanding presence. It’s an exquisite piece of architecture, delicate in detail, feminine. How could I have gone in and out the front door this morning and never stopped to appreciate where I was? I stand in front of the famous building and apologize. I say out loud how grateful I am to finally be home.

  There is a light on in the lobby, a small, friendly little glow. How lovely it looks in the midst of all this darkness, how heartening. I feel as though my spirit is being drawn toward its warmth, that the whirl of society and gaiety is welcoming me back into the fold. Even though I’ve made it to my destination, against all odds and after a long ordeal, I’m not ready to go inside yet. Once I cross that threshold, life will start up again, and I’ll forget what it was like out here where I’ve been, and who I was when I was in it. I don’t want to abandon my newfound trust in myself, or leave behind this wilderness that has embraced me and which I have conquered. I’m a different person.

  I stand for one last moment in the silence, listening to the sound of my own breath. I will never again have the chance to see New York this way: without any people, without any cars. I can see all the way down Fifth Avenue and Broadway, the wide, white thoroughfares sparkling in blue light, the sidewalks indistinguishable from the streets under deep snow. It’s all one groove in an endless canyon. I laugh out loud at my earlier fears. I wasn’t crazy, or hallucinating; I was navigating. Just like I always have. I can trust myself. It’s a slow process. But I can make time for it.

  I cross the plaza reluctantly, stealthily. I’ve grown accustomed to the way my boots squeak, and I even pivot a little on them, side to side, like a snowboarder. I see the doorman through the glass, listlessly leaning on the counter, picking at his fingernails. I’m going to sneak up on this guy and freak him the fuck out. My bold animal senses are shrinking back down to normal size, like Alice in Wonderland shrinking back down to fit through the door. Five minutes ago I was talking to my friend the Flatiron Building, eye to eye, soul to soul. Now I’ve shrunk down to the size of a penny under the Flatiron’s shoe. I am human again.

  The guy jumps back a little when he sees me. He instinctively prepares to open the door, then hesitates. I’m still ten feet away, and he’s probably traumatized from having the howling wind blow across his knees all night. He doesn’t know the wind has died down. I know what’s out there. He doesn’t.

  He looks good in his hipster bellhop vest. He pushes his face up to the window, squinting, looking left and right, trying to figure out where the hell I came from. I have appeared virtually out of nowhere. He holds open the door, and I pass under the thermal lamps, staring at the red, jiggling light it makes on the floor as I stomp my feet. Great soap cakes of snow slide down the side of my boots and float like tiny icebergs in their own puddles.

  “Welcome back.” The doorman is surprised by the sudden appearance in the middle of the night of a woman who has seemingly dropped from the sky.

  “Thanks!” I feel my windburned cheeks rise in a genuine smile for the first time since I left the stage. It feels good to be safe and inside. I can’t believe I made it.

  “I hope you had a nice evening.” He automatically performs his duty as doorman, then surreptitiously checks the 150 feet or so beyond the windows again, not sure if he’s missing something.

  “I did!” I turn around, thinking tonight must have been crazy at the hotel, too. “Did you?”

  “A lot of people got stuck, because their flights were canceled.” He steps forward, and I realize he is very handsome, maybe an actor or performer. “And then our night staff couldn’t make it in, because the snowplows gave up around six or seven, so it’s been pretty eventful. I’ll probably have to sleep here.”

  “You should.” I nod, walking toward the elevators. I can tell he expects more of an explanation, that there’s an unspoken agreement that you don’t walk up to the front door of the Flatiron Building at two in the morning in the middle of a blizzard without a story to tell. But I think I should stay a mystery. I don’t believe either of our memories of tonight will be improved by my telling him the details. If I explain what happened in a logical fashion, it won’t be true to my experience. If I tell him the story the way I perceived it, it’ll just sound crazy. That’s the nature of a worthwhile secret. It’s not that you won’t tell but that you can’t.

  Another guest walks into the lobby wanting information on canceled flights and airport closures.

  He sees me. “Hi, how’s it going?”

  “Good.” I step into the elevator and press my floor number. “How’re you doing?”

  The doors partially close. Then a second set of doors, hidden within the doors, closes the rest of the distance, locking lip to lip. I’m still in my heightened state of awareness. I understand why this detail draws my eye, and what the symbolism means: You have reserves of strength inside you that you’re completely unaware of until you absolutely need them. Many generations of inherited survival skills still reside within you, thanks to the reproductive success of your ancestors. Then they appear, as if by magic, to close the impossible gap. You’re never truly alone. Relatives who faced innumerable trials and tribulations are in you always, ready to come to your aid when the crucial moment arises.

  I wake up on the airplane to severe turbulence. The fuselage is bouncing so much that I become weightless for a few seconds before the aircraft slams down again and we rattle forward on the atmospheric white water. I can feel the pilots searching for a smoother ride—slowing down, then gunning the engines to climb above it. They haven’t made an announcement, so I assume that either these conditions are unavoidable or they’re acting out of consideration for the sleeping passengers. I close my eyes and do my best to ignore the vigorous shaking. I am incredibly lucky to have this opportunity to perform in Shanghai. The travel group that hired me is providing me with a tour guide and driver for several days of sightseeing, and those perks outweigh any distress I may feel on the flight.

  I’m no stranger to air travel. My parents took us everywhere, and I practically live in airports because of my work. Still, I hate flying over large bodies of water at night. My imagination runs wild. I have visions of the aircraft plummeting thousands of feet through the air and crashing into the sea. I’d rather be dead somewhere they could conceivably find my remains. Scratch that; I’d rather be alive. If I have to go down, please let it be in the jungle, or somewhere I have a chance of surviving. Every time the plane pitches and rolls, I feel my adrenaline spike. I sit up in the reclining bed, wriggling out from beneath the seat belt I’ve fastened tightly around the blankets. I lift the window shade and cautiously peer out into the darkness.

  There’s nothing to see. The space beyond the windowpane has no dimension, no depth. I could easily believe we’re on a movie set and I’m looking at a black drop curtain. I squint, pressing my face as close to the window as I dare without touching the surface. I think I spot something glowing in the distance; the orange lights of a city, perhaps; but when I check our position on the flight tracker, it says we’re way out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. As we get closer, I see that the orange glow is something burning in the water far below us. It’s too big to be an ocean vessel. I look around to see if any of the oth
er passengers have noticed the phenomenon, but they are all lying in their cubicles, quietly resting. Something is on fire out there in the night, something hot and bright beneath us.

  “Excuse me.” I stop the flight attendant on his way back to the galley. “I see something in the ocean that looks like it’s burning.”

  “We’re over the Aleutian Islands,” he tells me. “Part of the Ring of Fire. You probably saw a volcano.”

  I turn back to the window, trying to get another look at the lava, but we’ve already flown past it. I want to circle back and pass lower over the crater, gaze down into the caldera. When, if not now, will I ever get to witness such a thing? How incredible our lives would appear to someone living in an ancient civilization. They would never understand why we stare at these tiny glowing screens in front of our faces while traveling on an aircraft capable of bringing us to within spitting distance of the most miraculous sights on the planet. We sit there in a bad humor, angry that we’re not going to make it to our destination on time, while simultaneously experiencing one of the greatest achievements of mankind. We don’t even think about it. We’re lost in our own minds.

  It’s hard to step outside of your frame of reference. That’s partly why I accepted this trip to China. I wanted to go as far away from the United States as possible. I’m in a rut, unable to see beyond my own expectations. I need to gain a new perspective, to feel like the world is unknown and surprising again. My mood suffers when I get too comfortable, too familiar with my own opinions. I can’t see how my limited perspective blinds me. Even now I’m having difficulty toggling between two incongruous truths: In one sense, I’m looking down an aisle that’s two and a half feet wide and sixty feet long, but in another, I’m actually suspended in the middle of the sky, high above the deepest water in the ocean.

  It’s so much easier to live in denial. We’ve flung ourselves a seventh of the way to outer space, a feat no Iron Age hero or Mayan queen could have imagined, and half of us up here are grumbling about having to pay for Wi-Fi while the other half are munching on potato chips, laughing our asses off at the latest episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. How is it that we can function on multiple levels of reality simultaneously? I can already tell I’m not keeping up with technology. People are living in dimensions that I’m unaware of. If I don’t stay open to nuance and complexity, I’m going to miss out on what’s really happening. I’m going to make bad decisions. I’m going to fail.

  The cabin quivers and convulses, as if the bumpy air is trying to shake the nuts and bolts loose. I trust that the plane will hold together, but the atmosphere is doing its best to test our stability. It’s poetic that I’m halfway to China experiencing turbulence right now. I’m halfway through my life as well, and emotionally, it’s gotten pretty rocky lately. I’ve lived long enough to feel like the past is present and weighty, but the future grabs my attention, and I’m attracted to all its possibilities. It’s hard to maintain my balance, or even know what balance ought to look like at this stage. I need a new philosophy. No more of that Judeo-Christian sprawl. I need something lightweight. I need something I can fit in a backpack and take with me.

  * * *

  —

  Nĭ hăo! I’ve arrived in Shanghai! I can’t believe I’ve made it to the other side of the world. Even the name of the city sounds like a greeting. Driving in from the airport, I ask my chauffeur to teach me some useful Mandarin phrases. I googled a few important words before I left the States, and I try out my pronunciation now, much to his amusement. That’s how we pass the time en route to the hotel: as instructor and pupil, with him preparing me for a week of new and unusual experiences. There are so many questions I want to ask, but he thinks it’s more important that I master the Chinese expression of gratitude: xièxiè. No matter how many times I say it, something about my sibilance is still unsatisfactory to him. I haven’t located the middle point between a hard “s” and a soft “sh,” and I can’t stick the landing. He repeats it, his tone growing increasingly urgent. Soon we’re shouting “Thank you!” “Thank you!” “Thank you!” back and forth to each other in Chinese.

  We pass a band of enormous apartment blocks that stand like battlements guarding the jewel of a city within. I fall silent for a moment, awed by their resemblance in size and scale to structures on the Death Star in Star Wars. They look like holdovers from the Cold War era, utilitarian housing whose sole aim is to pack as many human beings inside the walls as possible. To me they appear austere and frightening, but my driver shrugs and says that a lot of people are happy to live there. The volume of people who come to work and raise families inside the footprint of Shanghai with its booming economy is staggering. It makes most American cities look like sparsely populated backwaters in comparison.

  As we approach downtown, the ultramodern spires of new construction rise up out of the heart of the Huangpu River. Their vibrant rainbow-colored LED displays evoke a fairy-tale realm, fantastical and futuristic. The delicacy of the soaring architecture is as delightful as the other buildings were intimidating. My driver says the pace of development is so intense that contractors routinely erect entire skyscrapers in under a year, using round-the-clock shifts of laborers and a scaffold machine called a “wall-climbing monster.” Many people lose their lives on the projects, because they have to work so swiftly. The government suppresses those statistics, he says. It is the price the Chinese have to pay, he tells me, for success in the global marketplace.

  None of this squares with the China I expected to encounter: a place of spiritual practices and philosophical principles. I had a stereotype in mind when I arrived that is quickly dissolving as I realize how outdated and uninformed my views about Asian culture are. In my hometown suburb just north of Chicago, you hear the refrain at every dinner party: “China’s going to take over everything.” There are a lot of businesspeople where I grew up who feel threatened by China’s expanding market power. I don’t know anything about economics, but I’m a passionate student of the soul. I was hoping to be influenced by a different set of values, to see how people incorporate the Taoist ethos of wu wei: living in naturalness, simplicity, and spontaneity. Now I’m worried that I’m merely naïve. We pull up to a stoplight that looks exactly like what you’d find at any intersection in Los Angeles or Chicago, and I mourn the diversity of urban life everywhere.

  I’m just about to ask my driver where I can go to experience something uniquely Asian, when I catch my breath at the sight of a ghost. There he is, amid all this modernity: an old street sweeper patiently cleaning the road beneath the bridge with a broom made of twigs. He’s wearing communist-style work clothes, a pair of cropped navy-blue trousers and a matching smock. What he’s doing out here in the middle of the night I can’t imagine. It’s not like he’s going to make a dent in a contemporary city’s detritus. He must do it because he likes to. He looks bent and careworn but peaceful in his industrious activity. His slow, even strokes remind me of the rhythm I used to get into when I raked leaves in the fall as a teen.

  Of all the chores my brother and I had to do, raking leaves was the one I learned the most from. Clearing the lawn of dead foliage and separating it into large piles in the street on a Saturday was one of my first experiences of mindfulness. I was determined to do a thorough job, but after an hour of struggling to rid the grass of every single leaf, my hands were covered in blisters, and it didn’t seem like I’d made very much progress. Every time I’d turn my back on a patch I’d recently completed, the trees would drop more leaves for me to collect. It felt like an impossible task.

  There is nothing that saps your strength like a challenge you believe you can’t win. An uphill battle may be exhilarating at first, but as your prospects diminish, the prize no closer than before, hopelessness replaces enthusiasm, and you give up—like folding a losing poker hand. It’s even harder to handle that feeling when you’re forced to press on against insurmountable odds. Athletes of
ten talk about falling back on technique, and it’s true that, if you can control your own movements, you can relax and let the larger issues sort themselves. It turns out that the only war you need to win is the struggle within yourself.

  But I didn’t know that as a teenager. Despondent, hating to do a less than perfect job, I would aimlessly swipe at the leaves—bummed that I wasn’t hanging out with my friends, angry at my parents for not paying for a landscaper, and resentful of any activity I couldn’t turn into art. What was the point? More leaves were just going to fall, and I would probably have to spend the next three Saturdays out in the front yard toiling like a laborer for three dollars an hour. My brother didn’t care how thorough he was. He worked his way back and forth systematically, until he could say he’d covered his half of the lawn. I would linger, knowing I would go over his parts after he left, trying to make something beautiful out of the ordinary. He saw his duty as a box to be ticked on a checklist. I was trying to effect transformation.

  Just when I’d begun to make headway on the east arm of the lawn, next to Cedar Street, the wind kicked up and scattered my subpiles all over the grass again. Now I was really pissed. I redoubled my efforts, throwing my full weight into it, raking like a maniac to stay ahead of the incoming weather. Sweating, my deltoids seizing up, I persisted—unable to accept that I would never prevail against Mother Nature. I believed with all my heart that if I just moved fast enough, I would accomplish my goal. What I didn’t anticipate was the wind dislodging the rest of the undecided, up in the treetops. They came down, ruining my whole afternoon’s work in five minutes. I was devastated. I had no strength left, and no hope of making a difference anymore. I wasn’t in it for the money. I didn’t give a shit about learning the value of hard work. I saw the grass as a green canvas that needed restoration, and I thought I could turn autumn back into summer again for a few more weeks of carefree fun.