by John Varley
Meers roamed the ovenlike interior of the airport. None of the restaurants and snack bars were open. With no refrigeration and no electricity to run the stoves, there was no point. The bars were open and serving warm beer, but had not so much as a pretzel. People sat wilted in their chairs, stunned by the heat, looking out over the ashen landscape. A nuclear holocaust might look a lot like this, Meers thought.
A few profiteers were selling ice water at five dollars a bottle. The lines were enormous. Meers found a clear space against a wall and sat down on his luggage. When he leaned forward sweat dripped off his nose.
He heard a commotion, and saw a man approaching with boxes on a hand truck. He was the pied piper of Atlanta, trailed by a mob of jostling people.
He stopped at an empty vending machine. When he opened the front someone in the crowd started pulling at a box. Someone else grabbed the other end. The box burst and spilled Snickers bars on the floor. In moments all the boxes had been torn open. When the tide ebbed away, the delivery man sat on the floor, feeling himself cautiously, amazed he hadn’t been ripped to shreds. He got up and wandered away.
Meers had snagged a bag of peanuts and a Three Musketeers. He ate every bite, then made himself as comfortable as possible against the wall and nodded off.
A lost soul was screaming. Meers opened his eyes, found himself curled up over his possessions, a rope of drool coming from his mouth. He wiped it away and sat up. Across the concourse a man in the remains of a suit and tie had gone berserk.
“Air!” he shrieked. “I gotta have air!” His shirt was torn at the neck, his coat on the floor. He swung a fire axe at a plate glass window. The axe bounced off and he swung it again, shattering the glass. He leaned out the window and tried to breathe the smoke outside. He shouted again and began struggling with his pants. His hands were spouting blood, deeply slashed on the jagged sill, but he didn’t seem to notice.
Off he ran, naked but for his pants trailing from one ankle and a blue silk tie like a noose around his neck.
Half a dozen security guards converged on him. They hit the man with their nightsticks and sprayed pepper in his face. They zapped him with tasers until he flopped around like a fish slick with his own blood. Then they cuffed and hog-tied him and carried him away.
The flight to Dallas was another 727. Half the passengers were under ten years old, in Atlanta for a Peewee beauty contest. The boys were in tuxedos and the girls in evening gowns, or what was left of them after twenty-four hours living rough at the airport with no luggage. Some of them were cranky and some were playful, and all were spoiled rotten, so they either sat in their seats and screamed, or turned the aisle into a rough-and-tumble race track. Supervision consisted of the occasional fistfight between fathers when a child’s nose was bloodied.
Meers had a window seat, next to a father who spent the whole flight carping about the judging. His son had not made the finals. The son, who Meers felt should have been left out for wolves to devour along with the afterbirth, sat on the aisle and spent his time tripping running children.
There was no meal. The catering services had been just as crippled as the snack bars at the airport. Meers was given a pack of salted peanuts.
Dallas-Fort Worth. DFW. It had been raining forty days and forty nights when the 727 landed. The runways were invisible under sheets of water. The mud between the taxiways was so deep and thick it swallowed jetliners like mammoths in a tar pit. Meers saw three planes mired to the wingtips. Passengers were deplaning into knee-deep muck, slogging toward buses unable to get any closer lest they sink and never be seen again.
The airport was almost empty. DFW was operating in spite of the weather, but flights were not arriving from other major hubs. Meers made it to the ticket counter, where the small line moved at glacial speed because only one agent had made it through the floods. When his turn came he was told all flights to his home had been canceled, but he could board a flight to Denver in six hours, where a connection could be made. It was on another airline, so he would have to take the automated tram to another terminal.
On the way to the tram he stopped at a phone booth. There was no dial tone. The one next to it was dead, too. All the public telephones in the airport were dead. The flood had washed them out. He knew his wife must be very worried by now. There had been no time for a call from O’Hare, and Atlanta and now Dallas were cut off. But surely the situation would be on the news. She would know he was stranded somewhere. It would be great to get back home to Annie. Annie and his two lovely daughters, Kimberly and . . .
He stopped walking, seized by panic. His heart was hammering. He couldn’t recall the name of his youngest daughter. The airport was spinning around him, about to fly into a million pieces.
Megan! Her name was Megan. God, I must be punchy, he thought. Well, who wouldn’t be? The hunger had made him light-headed. He breathed deeply and moved off toward the tram.
The door had closed behind him before he noticed the man lying on the floor at the other end of the car. There was no one else on board.
The man was curled up in a pool of vomit and spilled purple wine. He wore a filthy short jacket and had a canvas duffel bag at his feet. He looked like the man Meers had seen on arrival in Chicago, though that hardly seemed likely.
The tram made a few automated announcements, then pulled away from the concourse and out into the rain. It was pitch black. The rain pounded on the roof. There were flashes of distant lightning and a high, whistling wind. The tram pulled into the next concourse and the doors opened.
Three security guards in khaki uniforms stormed aboard. Without warning, one of them kicked the sleeping vagrant in the face. The man cried out, and the guards began battering him with their batons and boots. Blood and rotten teeth fountained from the man’s mouth and nose. Peter Meers sat very still, his feet and knees drawn together protectively.
One of the security men took a handful of the screaming man’s hair and another grabbed the seat of his pants, and they dragged him through the rear door of the tram and onto the platform. The third looked over at Meers. He smiled, touched the brim of his hat with his nightstick, and followed the others.
The door closed and the tram moved away. Meers could see the three still beating the man as the car moved out into the night.
Just short of the next concourse the lights flickered and went out, and the tram car stopped. Rain hammered down relentlessly. It gushed in rivers over the windows. Meers got up and paced his end of the car. He was careful not to walk as far as the stain of wine, urine, and blood at the other end, which looked black in the light of distant street lamps. He thought about what he had seen, and about his family waiting for him back home. He had never wanted so badly to get home.
After a few hours the lights came back on and the tram delivered him to the right concourse. He had to hurry to make the flight on time.
This time he was on a wide-bodied aircraft, a DC-10. There were not many passengers. He was assigned an aisle seat. The takeoff was a little bumpy, but once at altitude the plane rode smooth as a Cadillac on a showroom floor. This late at night he was given a box containing a tuna sandwich, a package of cookies, and some grapes. He ate it all, and was grateful. By the window was an old man wearing an overcoat and a fedora.
“All those lights down there,” the old man said, gesturing toward the window. “All those little towns, little lives. Makes you wonder, huh?”
“About what?” Meers said.
“You don’t feel a part of the world when you’re up here,” the man said. “Those people down there, going about their lives. Us up here, disconnected. They look up, see a few flashing lights. That’s us.”
Meers had no idea what the codger was getting at, but he nodded.
“Used to be the same feeling, in my day. Trains back then. Night trains. When you’re traveling, you’re out of your life. Going from somewhere to somewhere else, not really knowing where you are. You could lie there in your berth and look out the window at the nigh
t. Moonlight, starlight. Hear the crossing signals as you passed them, see the trucks waiting. Who was driving them? More lost souls.” He fell silent, looking out at the lights below. Meers hoped that was the end of it.
“I always wear a hat now,” the old man went on. “Had a little haberdasher shop in Oklahoma City, opened it right after the war. Not far from where that building blew up. Got into the haberdashery business just in time for men to stop wearing hats.” He chuckled. “One day it’s nineteen forty-nine, everybody wears hats. Then it’s nineteen fifty, suddenly all the hats are gone. Some say it was Eisenhower. Ike didn’t wear hats much. Well, I did okay. Sold a lot of cuff links. Men’s hosiery, silk handkerchiefs. Now I travel. Mostly at night.”
Meers smiled pleasantly and nodded.
“You ever feel that way? Cut off? Trapped in something you don’t understand?” He didn’t give Meers time to answer.
“I recall the first time I thought of it. Got my discharge in New Jersey, nineteen and forty-six. I took the train under the river. Came out where that World Trade Center is now. Say, they bombed that, too, didn’t they? Anyway, I thought I’d see Times Square. I went to the subway token booth. Not much bigger than a phone booth, and there’s this little . . . gnome in there. Dirty window, bars in front, a dip in the wooden counter so money could slide under the window, back and forth, money in, tokens out. It looked like that dip had been worn in the wood. Over the years, over the centuries. Like a glacier cutting through solid rock. I slid over my nickel and he slid back a token, and I asked him how to get to Times Square. He mumbled something. I had to ask him to repeat it, and he mumbled again. This time I got it, and I took my token. All that time he never looked at me, never looked up from that worn dip in the wood. I watched him for a while, and he never looked up. He answered more questions, and I thought he probably knew the route and schedule of every train in that system, where to get off, where to transfer.
“And I got the funniest thought. I was convinced he never left that booth. That he was a prisoner in there, a creature of the night, a troll down in the underground darkness where it was never daytime. That he’d long ago resigned himself to his lot, which was to sell tokens.” The old man fell quiet, looking out the window and nodding to himself.
“Well,” Meers said, reluctantly. “The night shift comes to an end, you know.”
“It does?”
“Sure. The sun comes up. Somebody comes to relieve the guy. He goes home to his wife and children.”
“Used to, maybe,” the old man said. “Used to. Now he’s trapped. Something happened—I don’t know what—and he came loose from our world where the sun eventually does come up. But does it have to?”
“Well, of course it does.”
“Does it? Seems to me it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the sun. Seems I’ve been on this airplane ever so long, and I have no way of telling that it’s actually getting anywhere. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe the plane will never land, it’ll just keep on its way from somewhere to somewhere else. Just like that train, a long time ago.”
Meers didn’t like the conversation. He was about to say something to the old man when he was touched lightly on the shoulder. He looked up to see a stewardess leaning toward him.
“Sir, the captain would like to speak to you in the cockpit.”
For a moment the words simply didn’t register. Captain? Cockpit?
“Sir, if you’d just come this way . . . ?”
Meers got up, glanced at the old man, who smiled and waved.
At first he could see little in the darkened cockpit. In front of the plane was clear night, stars, the twinkling lights of small towns. Then he saw the empty flight engineer’s seat to his right. As he moved forward, he kicked empty cans. The cabin smelled of beer and cigar smoke. The captain turned around and gestured.
“Clear the crap off that and siddown,” he said, around the cigar clamped in his teeth. Meers moved a pizza box with stale crusts off the copilot’s chair, and slid into it. The pilot unfastened his harness and got up.
“If I don’t take a crap in thirty seconds, I’m gonna do it in my drawers,” he said, and started toward the rear. “Just hold ’er steady.”
“Hey! Wait a goddam minute!”
“You got a problem with that?”
“Problem? I don’t know how to fly an airplane!”
“What’s to know?” The pilot was dancing up and down, but pointed to the instruments. “That’s your compass. Keep her right where she is, three one zero. This here’s your altimeter. Thirty-two thousand feet.”
“But don’t you have an autopilot?”
“Packed it in, weeks ago,” the pilot muttered, and banged hard with his fist on an area with dials that weren’t lit up. “Bastard. Look, I really gotta go.”
And Meers was alone in the cockpit.
He had a wild notion to just get up, pretend this never happened. Return to his seat. Surely the pilot would come back. It had to be some sort of joke.
The plane seemed level and steady. He touched the column lightly, felt the plane nose down the tiniest bit, saw the altimeter move slowly. He pulled and the big bird settled back at thirty-two thousand.
He quickly learned the biggest problem a pilot faced on a long night flight: boredom. There was nothing to do but glance at the two dials from time to time. His mind wandered, back to what the old man had been saying. And it just didn’t add up. Well, of course the plane was getting somewhere. He could see the lights moving beneath him. Those brighter lights at the horizon; could that be Denver? As for the sun not rising, that was just ridiculous. The world turned. One moment followed another. Eventually it was day.
The pilot came back in a cloud of cigar smoke. He reached into an open cooler near his seat and got out a can of beer, popped the top, and drained it in one gulp. He belched, crushed the can, and tossed it over his shoulder.
“Looks like I fucked up,” he said, with no apparent concern. “Sent for the wrong guy. Sorry about that, pardner.” He laughed.
“What do you mean?”
“Thought you was in the know. Looks like it was that old guy. Somebody wrote down the wrong seat number. Who’s runnin’ this fucking airline, anyway?”
Meers would have liked to know the same thing.
“Don’t you have a copilot? What do you mean, ‘in the know’?”
“Copilot had him a little accident. Night cops. They broke his fuckin’ arm for him. He’s in the hospital.” The man shuddered. “Could be three, four months yet till he gets out.”
“For a broken arm?”
The pilot gave him a tired look. He jerked his thumb back toward the cabin.
“Screw, why doncha? Get outta here. You’ll get it, one of these days.”
Meers stared at him, then got up.
“He’s dead, anyway,” the pilot said.
“Who’s dead?” The pilot ignored him.
Meers made his way down the aisle. The old man seemed asleep. His eyes were slightly open, and so was his mouth. Meers reached over and lightly touched the old man’s hand. It was cold.
A big fly with a metallic blue back crawled out of the old man’s nostril and stood there, rubbing its hideous forelegs together.
Meers was out of his seat like a shot. He hurried five rows forward and collapsed into an empty seat. He was breathing hard. He couldn’t work up any spit.
Later, he saw the stewardess put a blue blanket over the old man.
Denver. DEN. Tonight, it made Chicago seem like Bermuda. The sky was hard and fuming as dry ice, and the color of a hollow-point bullet. Temperature a few degrees below zero, but add in the windchill and it was cold enough to freeze rubber to the runway.
The huge plate glass windows rattled and bulged as Meers lurched down the concourse, his luggage caroming off his hips, ribs, and knees. A chill reached right through the floor and swept around his feet. He hurried into the men’s room and set his bags down on the floor. He ran water in the sink and splashed it on his face.
The room echoed with each drop of water.
He couldn’t bear to look at himself in the mirror.
He had to find the airline ticket counter. Had to get his boarding pass. Needed to find the gate, board the plane, make his connection. He had to get home.
Something told him to get out. Get out now. Leave everything. Go.
He walked quickly through the nearly deserted departure area, slammed through the doors and out onto the frozen sidewalk. He hurried to the front of a rank of taxis. It was an old yellow Checker, a big, boxy, friendly sort of car. He got in the back.
“Where to, Mac?”
“Downtown. A good hotel.”
“You got it.” The cabdriver put his car in gear and carefully pulled out onto the packed snow and ice. Soon they were moving down the wide road away from the airport. Meers looked out the back window. The Denver Airport was like a cubist prairie schooner, a big, horribly expensive tent to house modern transients.
“One ugly mother, ain’t she?” the cabbie said.
Meers saw the cabdriver in profile as the man looked in the rearview mirror. Bushy eyebrows under an old-fashioned yellow Checker Cab hat with a shiny black brim. A wide face, chin covered with stubble. Big hands on the wheel. The name on the cab medallion was V. KRZYWCZ. A New York medallion.
“Krizz-wozz,” the man provided. “Virgil Krzywcz. Us Pollacks, we sold all our vowels to the frogs. Now we use all the consonants the Russians didn’t have no use for.” He chuckled.
“Aren’t you a little far from home?” Meers ventured.
“Let me tell you a little story,” Krzywcz said. “Once upon a time, a thousand years ago for all I know, I was takin’ this fare in from La Guardia. To the Marriott, Times Square. I figure, that time of night, the Triborough, down the Roosevelt, there you are. But this guy’d looked at a map, it’s gotta be the BQE, then the Midtown Tunnel. Okay, I sez, it’s your money. And whattaya know, we make pretty good time. Only coming outta the tunnel what do I see? Not the Empire State, but that fuckin’ bitch of a terminal building. I’m in Denver. I never been ta Denver. So I looks back over my shoulder,” Krzywcz suited the action to his words, and Meers got a whiff of truly terrible breath, “and no tunnel, just a lotta cars honkin’ at me, me bein’ stopped in my tracks. And that’s the way it’s been ever since.”