Fly Me

by Daniel Riley

  It’s eleven o’clock—she has twenty minutes till it’s time to report for Grand Pacific’s noon nonstop back to LAX. Over the PA a disc jockey offers a taste of the new Zeppelin album, the first song. It’s somehow been less than a year since she submitted her thesis. Suzy’s footsteps meet the beat.

  She passes her gate—the waiting area’s only half-full and no one’s at the check-in desk quite yet, just a marquee with the flight number and the destination—and walks to the far end of the concourse, where Pan Am runs out of the cluster on the end. There are three empty gates and three gates with departures in queue. At 52: an 11:45 to Auckland. At 54: a 1:00 to Tokyo. At 56: a noon to San Francisco. Three options. Three orders of pursuit, three separate fates cast into the fate beyond this current one. The San Francisco flight is boarding now. It will be a full plane. Auckland should be preparing to depart. Tokyo would mean waiting around, maybe just the two pilots and a couple of stews aboard at this point. But her decision is really made up already.

  Suzy ducks into the nearest bathroom on the concourse. She sets up in a handicap stall and undresses. She hangs the aquamarine Grand Pacific uniform on the back of the door. From her bag she pulls out the blue-and-white Pan Am uniform, the uniform she modeled last night during the rainstorm. The uniform she wore to Paris and back while pinch-hitting for the Laguna girls. The loaner. A life borrowed.

  It fits her as it did the night before. Slim in the waist but layered by the jacket and skirt. Conservative by the standards of the smaller domestic lines. The pink-and-orange short shorts and go-go boots of Southwest. The sleeveless sheath in tangerine stripes of Continental. She packs her bag and opens the door and catches herself square in the mirror. White collar and white cravat. The sky-blue jacket—full sleeves, wide collar, and the five brass buttons. The sky-blue skirt—pleated off the hips, spilling to her knees. She affixes the brass wings to her breast pocket and pins her hair up on top of her head. She pulls the hat down over her hair. It clashes—the pale orange of her hair with the pale blue. She shifts her weight from her left side to her right in a rapid toggle. Her breathing skips like a scratched record. She runs each thumb lightly across the pads of her fingers, back and forth, double-time whole-hand snaps. In the mirror Suzy finds a pair of green eyes and sees herself, fairly, as the person she is in this moment. There is no Suzy but the one staring back, talented as she sometimes is at convincing herself Suzy Whitman’s is a different kind of life altogether. Her face goes a little haywire. It’s a tense grimace. Her mouth heavy angled, her eyes thin and near tears. She pulls on the down of her forearms.

  But just as suddenly as her face fell, it snaps back to attention. She exhales and appears as a picture of professional service, a young woman who’s thrilled to be working for you and only you. She turns a quarter and looks back at the mirror over her shoulder, and there’s that smile again—wide red lips and white teeth. “I’m Suzy,” she says in a mock whisper an octave higher than her own. She says it through the plastic fixture of her grin. “I’m Suzy,” she says, and now higher, with disdain creeping in at the edges: “I’m Suzy. Fucking fly me.”

  A woman in a yellow muumuu, as wide as she is tall, smiles at Suzy on her way to an empty stall. Suzy breathes through her nose, draws it way down into her stomach, and smiles in the mirror. “Hey,” she says to herself in a more careful whisper, “they just added me over here. I don’t know if it’s on the flight log yet or what, but they added me to the crew.” She starts again. “Hey, I don’t know if they told you yet, but I’m jumping on with you guys.…Yeah, I don’t know, guess it can’t hurt to have the extra help, right?” Again, quieter: “Hey, might not be on the log yet, but I’m with you now. I’ll head down, sure.…No, no need. I’ll talk to whoever’s in charge on board and see where she wants me.”

  She leaves the bathroom and walks on a slack line to the agent working gate 52. Flight 117: Honolulu to Auckland. It looks like an enormous flight and boarding will take a while. Suzy waits casually behind a short older man with a paintbrush on his lip. He’s asking for an aisle on account of his poor circulation. She can’t hear what the agent says, but the man turns, head-shakingly furious, and floats back to the waiting area in a dust cloud. Suzy chests up to the counter and tests it uncertainly.

  “Hey,” she says with a soft smile. “It might not be on the log yet, but they just sent me down here last minute, and I’m on this one now.”

  The woman has a brown bob. She’s squat and comes up to Suzy’s shoulders. She wouldn’t weigh in under the stew limit. The woman squints at Suzy and considers her paperwork. “We’re all set, full crew,” she says, almost like a question. “Are you sure?”

  “Oh yeah…,” Suzy says, swallowing, sucking the spit down out of her throat. The flight’s due to take off in twenty minutes. She can’t figure out why they haven’t started boarding. “Are you guys behind on boarding?”

  “There’s a mechanical issue. At least an hour, but we’re telling people two.”

  She can’t wait an hour. She can’t wait two hours. She starts to hear it the moment the woman finishes: “Suzy Whitman, please report to…” She’s not even certain it’s what’s actually said. She wouldn’t bet the money in her bag on it, at least. But she hears it again, faint at the other end of the terminal, words over the PA that’s not hooked up to the speakers down here. It sounds like: Suzy Whitman. Suzy whitman suzy whitman suzy. Whitman suzy whitman. She imagines the gate agent and the pilots and the passengers scouring the terminal. Dragging her back aboard the plane to L.A. Detaining her for her plans to fly as an imposter. She can still turn around and change back and get there in time. There are only two other planes at the Pan Am gates. And Tokyo’s not leaving for over an hour, either. Just gate 56 back to San Francisco. She thinks it fast and says it faster.

  “This is the flight to San Francisco, right?”

  The gate agent looks at her blankly.

  “Or is it…?”

  The gate agent turns over her shoulder toward the board: AUCKLAND, 11:45, PAN AM 117.

  “Ah, Auckland,” Suzy says. “That would’ve been something! My mistake. Pardon.”

  The woman squints at her again and then smiles with professional obligation.

  Suzy smiles, too, as she turns and inches toward the San Francisco flight. It has just begun boarding. She imagines the woman at the Auckland gate calling her colleague at gate 56. She imagines herself getting apprehended halfway between the two. She navigates the clumped masses of delayed Kiwis, dodges the airport security guards. At 56, first class has just boarded, up top, twenty total. And business class is invited to line up—another fortyish down below. On deck: maybe the first hundred in the rear, packing the back of the big boat first.

  She can see it out the window. A Pan Am 747. She’s flown a 747 twice since Paris—the PR trip to San Francisco and her last time to New York. The things she admired the first flight are still admirable now. This isn’t the lost luster of years of marriage—it’s more like a third date, and the eyes and teeth and lips look just as good as they did the first couple times they kissed. It is the rare case of a nice memory not overdistorting the impression. The glorious wingspan—nearly the width of a New York City block. The pretentious posture of the tail. The unending row of windows, lined up along the white plane side like candy dots on wax paper. Stretching so far out toward the runway that the laws of perspective make them disappear. She sees the pilots through the window of the cockpit, two pilots flipping switches and flipping laminated pages in a steel-ringed book of air maps. The ocean is wide and the islands are small.

  Suzy does it again. A rerun, five minutes on. The same line practically, but with greater assertion. The belief that she’ll need to squelch the doubt expressed by the Auckland gate agent if she’s called over.

  “Hey,” Suzy says with a soft smile, “it might not be on the log yet, but they just sent me down here last minute, and I think I’m on this one now.”

  “Ohh-kay,” the woman says, glancing d
own at her paperwork and running the tip of her pencil along the names on the printout. “I don’t see any mention of an additional crew member here. But I guess that makes sense. They told us a girl called in last-minute sick, that she wouldn’t make it. But they said we’d be forced to do without.” Suzy can’t believe what she’s hearing. She’s swimming in her disbelief, gasping in her mind for air as she dunks into her marvelous fortune. The gate agent has said something she hasn’t heard.

  “Hmm?” Suzy says.

  “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Grace,” she says, the first name out. She hasn’t even considered. “Grace Schuyler.”

  It’s a mistake. Already a mistake and she hasn’t even crossed over into the jet bridge.

  “Great,” the gate agent says, forcing an exhausted smile and taking her name down in block-letter pencil.

  This time it’s unmistakable. It’s in her ears, out of the speakers, even at this end. “Grand Pacific stewardess Suzy Whitman to gate twenty-eight immediately. Your flight is boarding. Please report to gate twenty-eight, Grand Pacific stewardess Suzy Whitman.”

  It’s real. The flight to L.A. is boarding. But she is on a flight to San Francisco. Or not quite.

  “Just head down there and tell them what the deal is,” the gate agent says.

  Suzy slings her bag over her shoulder and clicks down the jet bridge. It’s wide open, the gap in boarding zones. It occurs to her as she takes the jet bridge with strong strides just how much she’s improved at walking in heels. The runoff effect of nine months of flying. She pulls her shoulders back and bows her legs inward an extra couple degrees at each step so that her feet find a tighter line. She feels exceptionally tall. She feels she can make her exceptionally tall hat touch the roof of the jet bridge.

  There’s a backup at the door: a diminutive passenger runs his fingers along the rivets at the entry, the sleek seam there, in the sort of awe Suzy figures only men who work on machines might experience. His wife tugs at his free hand and pulls him aboard.

  Suzy steps up and places her fingers on the same cool rivets. She thinks of Wayne. The stew at the door looks up and is blankly indifferent at first, but then flickers into full flame, a little tick of the head and a big, relieved smile.

  “Well, hey,” she says, “we thought we were gonna be down one.”

  Suzy reflects the angle of the woman’s neck back at her, reflects the smile, too.

  “Yeah, they just told me to head on down here, that I’m with you.”

  “Well, that’s great,” the woman says. “We’re just settin’ up shop here, getting drinks going, warming up the coffee.”

  “Just let me know where I can start.”

  Suzy knows the routine from the back-and-forth to Paris. She consciously summoned the memory of those flights last night, recalled the differences in service. She drops her bag in the stew cargo compartment and gets to work.

  It goes as it goes. The plane fills up. Not quite full capacity—three hundred and sixty is the final count. That’s a lot of lives.

  Suzy works the rear—coffee, water, towels. Coffee, tea, or me. TWA coffee or TWA tea. She finds herself enjoying it, almost missing it from a future vantage.

  They’re away from the gate. They’re buckled in for takeoff. Last night’s rain clouds seem imagined, it’s so blue out her porthole. She holds fixed on the picture out the window, blurred by the thick plastic—Vaseline lensed.

  There’s a lineup on the runway. The girl buckled in next to her is six or seven clues into the Sunday Times crossword. Maybe a New York–based crew, Suzy thinks. So many can be so talkative, but these ones are trapped up and into their own thing.

  The phone rings in the back cabin. Suzy lifts the receiver and the captain says, “On deck.”

  The way they’re nosed, Suzy can see the plane in front of them make its wide turn onto the runway and fire its engines. The jetstream logo on the golden tail of Continental. Continental: Seattle or Los Angeles, she bets. Six hours flat, riding the currents. By the time the thought’s through, the plane is gone, and they’re making the same wide right onto the runway, stopping at the line, a blue 747 race car in the starting grid at the Glen. Just before the plane rocks back to a full stop, the jet engines wind higher than she’s ever heard, fuel tonnage and physical force, three hundred and sixty passengers, eight stews, two pilots, jet engines riveted to ninety-foot wings, engines tall enough to accommodate one Suzy standing up. The palm trees start to tick past like eighth and sixteenth notes, speeding toward the inevitable conclusion of a resolved piece of music.

  Just as they hadn’t been for the history of time, they are now up in the air together—these specific many souls aboard Flight 45 to San Francisco. They’re off the earth, each with the other, the wheels of the airplane curling up inside for safekeeping. Fantastic physics settle them out over the immediate water of the Pacific, this particular water tinted green on account of it cuddling up to the only land for two thousand miles.

  They’re way up, fast.

  Suzy’s on the plane. They’re on their way to San Francisco, California, USA.

  They level off at thirty thousand feet. Heading east. Heading home. The floor is flat, and so they wheel the drink cart through the back of the plane, Suzy and the crossword stew, Miriam. The passengers drink so much POG.

  It takes thirty minutes, and Suzy finds herself asking passengers to repeat their drink orders, almost every row. Her mind is elsewhere. It has drifted up front, up top.

  Suzy’s plan wasn’t this at all. She’s practically heading right back to where she came from. Sure, San Francisco is six or seven hours from Sela by car, four hundred miles. But on the global scale, when you really take a look at a map that lets you see both Russia and the United States in the same picture—from that height San Francisco and Los Angeles are the same. She’d go back and everyone would be waiting. Wayne, Edith, Grace, Mike, Dave, Billy, Honeywell. Police at SFO. Authorities from both Grand Pacific and Pan Am. She’s already forfeited the job. It was over an hour ago, when she ignored the announcement, the call that said: This is it for you, Suzy Whitman. But flying back into the trap wasn’t the plan. The plan was to step aboard, luck into working the flight, and land wherever she might on the other side of the ocean. Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Auckland, Sydney. Those were really the only options, escape. Wayne Edith Grace Mike Dave Billy Honeywell. Tokyo Seoul Hong Kong Bangkok Auckland Sydney.

  San Francisco.

  The plan is shot. But high as she feels in the aisle, high as she feels on adrenaline, she also feels herself approaching a sticky inevitability. A fate with gravity. A reckoning with the thing she’s known deep down over the last two days she’d really need to do. There is nowhere else to go—no one, no place, certainly not Los Angeles or San Francisco. Certainly not those places most of all. She is a light-boned bird holding patient in the updraft of a skyscraper, floating on the edge of the breeze, that instant before abandoning the comfort of the rail and giving into certain flight.

  What happens as Suzy moves from the back of the plane to the front? Once the drink service is wrapped and the passengers unclick to drain their bladders? What does Suzy see? She sees baldness, she sees hair, she sees black and brown and sandy blond. She sees no red but imagines her own. She sees glasses and stripes and blankets and books. She sees babies-to-be in their final month of preexistence. She sees olds with less than a year left on the clock. That’s about it, though. It’s not a vision of details—it’s a vision of breadth. Three hundred sixty passengers and they do their best to cut a wide berth of Americanness. But beyond the vague perceptions, the named attributes, she doesn’t see much more.

  Her vision narrows on the stairway to the jet’s second floor. And in a protracted instant that might be an hour or a minute or a second, her heels are on the stairs, her eyes are on the door to the cockpit, her fingers are on the latch to the door. She feels the eyes of the upstairs stews on her as she knocks.

  “We already�
�,” one begins to say. But the door folds open.

  “Hey,” Suzy says to the cockpit, “I was just wondering if you needed any help up here.”

  They keep their eyes busy on the instrumentation, on the neon horizon. The copilot lifts a paper cup of coffee and shakes his head, taken care of.

  “You sure?” Suzy says.

  He turns now, to assure her he’s sure. But she’s got the prettiest smile she can muster up. It makes him smile, too. As though the follow-up question’s a private joke.

  “I’m…yeah, I’m pretty good,” the copilot says. He looks young. He looks younger than Mike, younger than Billy. Closer to Suzy’s age. She’s never flown with a pilot this young. He keeps his eyes right on her.

  “You know,” the captain says without turning, “I could use a warm-up.”

  “Great,” Suzy says, smiling again at the copilot.

  She unbends herself out of the doorframe and lengthens herself toward the ceiling. The other stews watch her move to the coffeepot. They’re keenly aware that something’s going on, but they’ve seen it before, they all have again and again, a hard play for the pilots. It’s just not usually this brazen, this quick out of the gate.

  Suzy knocks again. The door opens. The copilot takes the cup for the boss. The crunched space behind their seats, where Suzy stood while taking lessons from pilots on other flights—it’s a little roomier on a 747. There’s plenty of space to stand and close the door.

  Suzy scoots in and latches it shut.

  The copilot turns again, a little disbelieving, and just says, “Hey.”

  Suzy watches the water out the window. Fixes her eyes on the crisp, level DMZ between sky and sea. Two blues all the way home.

  “So,” Suzy says, a little breathless. “Something’s gonna happen.”

  “What’s that?” the copilot says, caffeinated, down to play.