O Beautiful

by Jung Yun

The plane hits a patch of rough air and pitches sharply off to the side. She puts her hands out to steady herself, unnerved that she can touch both walls. The bright blue chemicals in the toilet, sloshed around by the sudden rocking motion, sting her nostrils with the scent of ammonia, mixed with something that reminds her of dirty diapers. She can’t be in this bathroom much longer, not with these walls, this smell. When the plane rocks again, more violently than it did before, she opens the door an inch and looks outside. The cabin lights and fasten seat belt signs are on. Everyone is waking and preparing to land. The captain is making an announcement about turbulence, only half of which she can hear through a thin crackle of static. Elinor walks slowly, watching the back of the man’s head as she approaches their row. She takes her seat again, barely hovering over the edge of it, and leaves her seat belt unbuckled. He ignores her, yawning into his fist as if he’s tired or bored. He makes no comments about her nap, asks no questions about how she feels, which seems odd to her. She wants to look at him now, to read his face and see what it says. Elinor turns as dots of amber appear outside his window, the beginnings of Avery’s sparsely lit grid.

  “What—what did you do?” she asks.

  “Huh?” His voice has lost all the coaxing charm it had before.

  “Did you…”

  “Please put your seat belt on, ma’am.” The flight attendant, the same one from the galley, stops and watches Elinor until she does as she’s told.

  The descent makes her nauseous again. Every air pocket lifts and lowers them, as if the plane is made of paper. Elinor tries to brace herself on the armrests but grazes the man’s elbow and recoils. She shuts her eyes and sits compactly for the rest of the landing, elbows propped on knees, forehead cupped in hands. Somewhere, not far from where she’s sitting, a little girl’s voice rises with curiosity.

  “What’s wrong with that lady?”

  Elinor doesn’t need to look up to know that she’s the lady. The girl’s mother shushes her as the nose of the plane drops toward the ground and the landing gear extends into place beneath them, the discomfiting sound of metal grinding against metal. Elinor rummages through the seat pocket for an air sickness bag, but finds only a safety card and a sticky candy bar wrapper left behind from a previous flight. She leans forward again, squeezing her eyes shut as the plane hits the tarmac too hard and bounces. Once, twice. It touches down the third time and every mechanized part in the engine roars in deafening unison. The plane continues to speed, much longer and faster than it should, on and on until she thinks there can’t possibly be any runway left. As soon as she’s convinced of this, as soon as she imagines the plane careening into a barrier wall and bursting into flames, it’s over.

  Bells ring. Metal buckles release. People shift and gather their things. Elinor sits up, blinking back spots, her teeth sore from the set of her jaw.

  “Hope you had a nice nap,” the man says.

  There’s something in his voice now, something both menacing and slightly mocking. It infuriates her. She grabs her bag and pushes into the aisle, cutting ahead of people who mutter under their breath as she moves toward the front of the plane. A flight attendant stands beside the cockpit door with a brittle smile.

  “Have a good evening,” he says.

  Elinor stops in front of him. “I think I might have been…” Why can’t she just say it? What is she even trying to describe? It felt real to her, but not exactly.

  “Did you forget something?”

  A man squeezes past, bumping Elinor in the back with his suitcase.

  “Ma’am, would you please move out of the aisle? People need to get by.” The flight attendant steers Elinor into the galley by the elbows, startling her with his icy hands. “If you forgot something in your seat area, you’ll just have to wait here until everyone deplanes.”

  Elinor is so aware of her breathing, the hummingbird-fast beat of her heart. She can’t be in this narrow space while a surge of people comes at her. She can’t be here when the man eventually catches up. She steps around the flight attendant and pushes her way onto the jet bridge. Her legs feel stiff and heavy at first, but the more she focuses on distancing herself from the plane, the more she regains control of them. She walks faster and faster, passing people on conveyor belts, eventually speeding through the terminal as if she’s late for a connection. The airport is much bigger than she expected. It stretches on and on, all kiosks and newsstands and gleaming new glass and metal. She follows the signs toward baggage claim and the exit, her calves knotted with cramps from pounding against the white marble floors. As she steps onto the escalator, she looks up at a large banner hanging overhead. It welcomes her and her fellow passengers to Avery, North Dakota.

  3

  There’s a warm white light shining on her face. She opens her eyes and finds herself in a car she doesn’t recognize, an SUV that still smells factory new. When she turns the key in the ignition, the dashboard lights up with too much information. It’s 7:30 in the morning. It’s 68 degrees outside. The gas tank is three-quarters full. The radio is set to a country-western station, and a man is singing something about a truck. She turns off the music, trying to collect her thoughts, which feel like pieces of a broken mirror, sharp and shiny and too tempting not to touch. On the passenger seat, she finds a rental agreement, time stamped from 11:19 the night before. “Do you want to upgrade for six dollars a day,” she remembers a young woman asking. “Just six dollars more.” Slowly, it starts to come back to her. The hard upsell at the Enterprise desk. The sound of her tires swerving off the road. The gas station where she pulled over, unable to keep her eyes open for a minute longer.

  She didn’t intend to sleep in the car all night, with her doors unlocked, no less. She sits up straight and looks around, her neck stiff, her head pounding and pounding like a drum. She thinks she had three Bloody Marys on the flight. Maybe four, at the most. But the hangover is punishing, as if she drank much more. She suspects the Restoril did this to her. The Restoril mixed with the alcohol. She rummages through her bag until she finds the small plastic bottle in a side pocket. Then she rolls down her window and hurls the bottle out, scraping her knuckles against the door.

  “Fuck!” she shouts. “Fuck! Fuck!”

  The bottle disappears in a patch of weedy grass growing along the side of the road. She stares at the spot where she threw it, embarrassed and enraged. She has so much riding on this trip. This can’t be how it starts.

  A semi speeds past, leaving a thick cloud of dust settling in its wake. She sucks on her scraped knuckles and looks around, her mouth filling with the mineral taste of blood. The gas station where she pulled over is called the White Wing. It has two ancient-looking pumps that don’t have credit card readers and an old wooden sign with a cartoon eagle. CHEAPEST GAS IN TOWN, the eagle declares. Just beyond the gas station is a two-lane road, and beyond the road is a field, green and gold and flat without relief. Pumpjacks scattered around the field bob their heads, rhythmic and slow. She counts six of them altogether, moving in hypnotic, sleep-inducing unison. The motion is soothing. She’d be content to just sit and watch for a while, but the longer her window is open, the more she notices it. A whiff of something that reminds her of petroleum jelly. Not long ago, she read an article about the boom’s effect on air quality in the region, quoting residents who said the nonstop drilling made the air smell like Vaseline. During the growing season, it supposedly smelled like Vaseline and manure.

  Inside her cavernous bag, her phone begins to vibrate, rattling all the metal zippers and snaps. She digs it out and squints at the cracked screen. The call is from a local number, or local-ish. She recognizes the 701 area code, the same one for the entire state.

  “Hello?”

  “Well, hello! Good morning. Is this Elinor Hanson?” The voice on the other end is young and buoyant, unnaturally cheerful, especially given the hour.

  “Yes. That’s me.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad I finally caught you. This is Hannah from the front desk
at the Thrifty Inn in Avery. You had a reservation with us for ten nights starting yesterday, but it says here that you didn’t check in yet. We’ve got a really long waiting list, especially for units with kitchenettes like yours, so I’m just calling to see if you still want the room.”

  Hannah is talking too loud and too fast, using words that make Elinor feel out of sorts. Waiting lists, kitchenettes, things she doesn’t care about. She removes the phone from her ear and scrolls through her notifications. Three missed calls and two voice mails, all from the same number. She remembers what the irritable old woman who booked her travel arrangements said after finalizing her itinerary: in thirty-five years, she’d never had more trouble finding hotel accommodations for someone. According to Peg, if it hadn’t been for a last-minute cancellation, Elinor would have been shit out of luck.

  “Yes,” she says, rolling up her window. “Yes. I definitely want that room. I’m coming over right now.”

  As a child, Elinor and her family took a road trip every summer, usually visiting the Badlands in the southwestern part of the state or the better-known Badlands in South Dakota. Sometimes, they ventured farther west to Montana or Wyoming, passing through Avery along the way. The town she remembers was barely a dot on the map back then. Just one main road in and out, and a five- or six-block “downtown” that consisted of a post office and a handful of shops that often appeared closed. To the north and south of this road were houses, and to the north and south of those houses were farms. Her father, a career military officer, was fond of efficiency and routine, even when they were on vacation. He disliked taking unscheduled breaks, but if he had to pull over, he insisted on waiting for a “GFT” town—a town where they could find gas, food, and a toilet—so they could get everything out of the way at once. Back then, Avery didn’t even meet these standards. On the handful of occasions when Ed begrudgingly stopped there, it was usually because Elinor or Maren, her older sister, was carsick.

  Over twenty years have passed since she last saw Avery, and she understands that things will look different now. But she’s still not prepared for how different. A few miles after an exit for Theodore Roosevelt National Park, traffic begins to slow and she finds herself in a caravan of dust-covered trucks and tankers and semis, all crawling toward the town line. Then the fences appear on both sides of the road where old buildings are being torn down or renovated and nearly every vacant lot is under construction. Signs announce the coming of an Outback Steakhouse, a NAPA Auto Parts store, and a Home Depot. Billboards advertise newly built apartment complexes and housing developments with names that seem chosen at random, without any connection to the landscape at all. The Monarch. The Lyric. The Eldorado. A new Ford dealership stands next to an even newer-looking Walmart, both displaying patriotic GRAND OPENING bunting across their entrances. Even the bright gold streetlights look new, hanging at intersections that probably didn’t exist before the boom. The lede of her article almost writes itself. In Avery, North Dakota, the epicenter of the North American oil boom, one might forget that the rest of the country is still struggling to recover from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

  The Thrifty Inn sits on the main road, sandwiched between a self-service car wash and the fire station. From a distance, it looks like every other budget hotel she’s ever stayed at except for the parking lot, which is completely full, littered with signs warning would-be trespassers to keep out. The vehicles in the lot are mostly trucks—passenger, cargo, semi—haphazardly parked in one-and-a-half spaces, sometimes more. Elinor circles the lot twice before pulling onto a scrap of grass, following the lead of two other drivers who simply gave up and parked their huge SUVs on the yellowing lawn.

  The lobby has the feel of a train or bus station with people coming and going in every direction. She squeezes through a crowded lounge area where guests—mostly men—are helping themselves to an anemic continental breakfast consisting of coffee, cereal, cups of yogurt, muffins wrapped in clear cellophane, and a basket of waxy-looking fruit. Elinor joins the end of a line at the front desk, surveying her fellow guests, most of whom appear to be middle managers or consultants for oil companies, dressed in button-down shirts and khakis, but no ties. In her hungover state, she makes the mistake of looking at an older man for a few seconds too long. He responds by smiling lewdly at her, his capped teeth gleaming, a glint of something silver. She lowers her head and stares at the dull brown carpet, trying not to roll her eyes at him, even though she wants to. The last time she did that to a stranger for telling her to smile, he followed her for two city blocks, shouting “cunt” at her back.

  All around her, men greet each other with backslaps and high fives, making pronouncements like “living the dream” and “another day in paradise”—things she didn’t know people really said except on TV. Some of their accents are Southern, ranging from genteel drawls to deep, unintelligible Bayou twang. Others sound vaguely foreign, but she can’t identify what countries they’re from. The line she joined is moving slowly, so she listens in on nearby conversations: two men trying to one-up each other with stories about how dumb their bosses are; another man arguing with his wife on the phone, telling her it’s not his fault that he had to work during their anniversary.

  “So what do you want me to do, Paula?” he keeps asking, his voice cracking with a sad kind of desperation. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

  As her line inches forward, Elinor hears Hannah chattering away again, and her head throbs a little harder. She looks up to see a big, bosomy farm girl with rosy pink cheeks, dressed in a too-tight uniform. Her white button-down shirt is about to pop one of its pearl buttons, and her gray blazer puckers at the armpits.

  “We’d be happy to send up a cot for fifty dollars a night,” Hannah tells a man wearing his mirrored sunglasses on the back of his head.

  “You mean fifty dollars total, right?” the man asks. “You’re not really charging people fifty bucks a night for some rickety old cot?”

  Hannah smiles without apology. “I’m afraid we are, sir. Cots are in very high demand right now. Would you still like one?”

  The man doesn’t bother to respond before he storms off, sighing with theatrical exasperation. “Everything in this town is such a goddamn scam,” he says loudly, which elicits a few chuckles and one “no shit, Sherlock” from passersby.

  Hannah must have heard all of this, but her face shows no sign of registering the man’s complaint. It just resets to a polite, professional smile as Elinor steps up to the front desk and gives her name.

  “Miss Hanson! You made it. I’ve got your paperwork all ready to go over here.” Hannah turns to reach for a file and nearly whips a male coworker in the face with her ponytail. “Now let’s get you checked in right away.” She types something on her keyboard with pointy lavender nails. Each click and clack sounds louder than it should, reverberating through Elinor’s temples, scratching behind her eye sockets. “I’m afraid we’ll still have to charge you for your first night since you didn’t change your reservation before the deadline. But we have you in a nice queen suite on the third floor. I just need to know how many cots you’d like in your room.”

  “Cots?”

  “Yes, you may have heard me tell the gentleman in front of you that they’re fifty dollars a night.”

  The woman who booked her travel said it was shameful, how all the hotels in the area were gouging. Even roadside motels were inflating their rates by a hundred, sometimes 200 percent, and yet they were still full. Elinor’s queen suite at the Thrifty costs $480 a night—a reasonable price in a big city, but unimaginable in western North Dakota prior to the boom. She assumes that most of the rooms here have too many people staying in them, crashing on cots and sofas and floors.

  “I don’t need any. I’m here alone.”

  “Oh,” Hannah says, drawing out the sound for a beat too long. “Very nice. A suite all to yourself. Alright then, let me just double-check that we have a credit card on file.” She narrows her e
yes at her computer screen. “It looks like this is being charged to a corporate travel account for the Standard?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I’ve seen that at the doctor’s office. It’s a magazine, right?”

  She nods.

  “Do you work there?”

  She nods again, less certain this time.

  “Are you like an editor or something?”

  “No. Just a writer.” The word still feels too big, too pretentious. “I’m writing an article for them.”

  “Really?” Hannah leans forward, revealing a glimpse of her pale pink bra. She lowers her voice to a whisper. “I’m actually double majoring in English and communication at Avery State. Would you mind me asking how someone can get a job like that?”

  Elinor is so tired, so numb with disbelief about where she is and how she got here. She’s tempted to tell Hannah the truth: that she dated one of her professors in grad school, that he called less than two weeks ago and asked if she’d like to take over a story he’d been working on for the Standard. She remembers it was a Friday because he was on the road, driving to his house in the Catskills, where he usually spent his weekends.

  “Can you talk?” he shouted at her over a bad connection, so bad that he had to hang up and call again.

  When they reconnected a few minutes later, he explained that he needed to have a hip replacement, something he sounded almost bashful about, sensitive as ever to things that made him feel his age, which was only sixty-three. His doctor had offered him a cancellation date in June, but recuperating from the surgery wouldn’t allow him to travel for a while. The article he’d been researching about the oil boom in North Dakota demanded that he travel.

  “You grew up near the Bakken, right? That’s what I told my editor.”

  Richard’s call was surprising on so many levels. She hadn’t spoken to him in over a year, not since she’d graduated from her master’s program. And despite his vast network of connections, he’d never helped her find work before, never even thrown so much as a lead her way. A feature article in the Standard was something she aspired to—it was something that everyone in her field aspired to—but few ever got the chance. Opportunities like this didn’t go to people like her, unagented freelancers working whenever and wherever they could.