Amy grabbed his collar and tugged him into the house. “I don’t blame you one bit,” she said. “Tomorrow we’ll wash it off and leave it inside. Tomorrow I’ll still be here.” He muttered something under his breath and went to bed. What a wonderful dog he was. Barking at ants in the moonlight, and she allowed the thought, just for an instant, that this would someday be a memory. That all that remained of this stalwart, irascible creature would be this image, which would disappear when she died, along with whatever random memories of herself remained extant, and that she had no say in who remembered her, and that in no time at all, no one would. But right now he was immortal. Right now was excellent.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Storyteller
The next morning Maxine FedExed her a twenty-DVD Conquer-Your-Fear-of-Flying course, the running time of which was over one hundred hours. Since Amy would be airborne in thirty-six, she called Maxine to complain and was told that DVDs numbered 19 and 20 represented a crash course. “Is that supposed to be funny?” Amy asked.
“I hate it when you lose your sense of humor,” said Maxine.
“Well, then, stop sending me to my flaming violent death.”
“They have DVD players onboard. You can watch it while you fly.”
“And change my ticket to one-way,” said Amy. “I’m taking the train back.”
“What makes you think I bought a round-trip ticket? You’re booked on Amtrak sleepers from Penn Station to LA.”
Amy hung up rather than thank Maxine for her thoughtfulness. She really couldn’t manage that on the day before her flight. She spent the rest of the day cleaning her house and throwing away most of her clothes, outfits she hadn’t worn for years and didn’t want strangers rifling through with pity and alarm. By the time she was through, two drawers had been completely cleaned out. Alphonse frolicked in her half-empty closet. Since she would be gone either forever or for only two days, she made ordinary arrangements with the Blaines.
The night before, she slept like ice, dropping off without preamble, and woke up the same way an hour later. She spent the rest of the night at her computer. At dawn, just before she turned it off, she erased her search history, depriving anyone who came in after her death to mop up the spectacle of her search strings:
plane crash statistics
plane crash statistics by company
why do planes crash?
jet engine failure
what happens when you burn to death?
breathing at 30,000 feet
falling from 30,000 feet
jet crash survival rates
fear of flying
acrophobia
agoraphobia
claustrophobia
pteromechanophobia
airport security
cattle handling
heavy-duty squeeze chute
max winston
amy gallup
Having numbed herself with facts and images and secreted two capsules of Klonopin in her change purse, Amy stayed frozen through the drive to Lindbergh and the two-hour check-in procedure. Docile passengers trundled single-file as though actually confined by narrow cattle chutes. Though some of the livestock were white-faced, exuding fear, most were nonchalant or downright happy. Eventually they were separated into shorter lines, one for breeding, one for slaughter. Many carried infants, kept their older children close, reassuring them with pats, corralling them with firm yanks. In her head, the slaughterhouse threatened to morph into Auschwitz, and Amy shut the movie down and would have blushed in shame had her blood been warm enough. It was so odd how the same mind could entertain competing narratives simultaneously. In one, she shuffled to her death; in the other, right alongside it, she sneered at her own self-indulgent terror. What a ridiculous woman. Amy took off her sandals, placed her pocketbook in a gray feed bin. A distinguished elderly Frenchman was led off down a special third chute, swearing about his souliers, apparently refusing to take them off. Good for you, she thought, as she submitted to an outrageous X-ray strip search, Aux barricades! But by the time she took her seat on the plane, he was two rows behind her, being laughed at by his American wife.
The hackneyed phrase “in the belly of the beast” had entered her mind at the moment she entered the plane, which was a good thing, as it annoyed her and dulled the horror of the moment. Belly indeed. The plane was no whale, no Questing Beast. It was an ugly place crowded with uniform objects all shaped like blue and white lozenges, no sharp corners or edges anywhere. Lozenge chairs, lozenge windows, lozenge compartments, the whole thing like a giant box of Sucrets. Amy was now encased neatly in dread. There was no wildness to it, though, nothing she could not handle. The first thing she did after getting settled was to take out her notepad and jot down “Manageable Dread.” This was a hubristic act, not to mention a crap title, but what the hell.
When to take the Klonopin? If Amy dry-swallowed them now, she would with luck be affected for the full duration of her direct flight to New York. She read the instructions, which Maxine had folded around the pills when she’d stuck them into the DVD package, and according to these she should take only one Klonopin, because more than one could cause “drowsiness, alterations in mental status, confusion, coma, and respiratory arrest,” all of which sounded promising. Except perhaps confusion. If she were confused into imagining she was home with Alphonse, fine, but might she turn into one of those creatures who become shrieking Jeremiahs and have to be pried off the emergency exit door at 30,000 feet? Or worse, what if she became voluble, spilling her guts to bored neighbors, swiping their drinks, groping them, sniping at photos of their grandchildren? Loss of control, Amy knew, lay at the heart of pteromechanophobia. She knew this because she’d read up on it a few hours earlier. She had known it anyway, since a monkey could figure it out. All forms of public transportation involved handing over control of life and limb to strangers; flying called on Herculean feats of denial in sentient, earthbound animals. Put them both together, and full-blown panic is the most rational of responses.
All around her, as they waited for takeoff, people fiddled with their seatbacks, leafed through magazines, stared out the window with unfocused eyes. They were thinking about the people and places they were leaving behind; in a few hours, they would anticipate disembarking, hugging relatives, hailing taxis. They took so much for granted. Amy, who seldom envied anyone, envied all of them and wished mightily for a stupidity pill. Stupefaxopram. Panglossonil. Something that would leave her inhibitions alone and just crank up her denial mechanism, which she pictured as a frozen set of gears in the back of her brain, rusted from disuse. Pollyannazam. The first-class cabin was warm, the seats swiveled, and her neighbor’s seat was over a foot away. She thought of offering him her window seat—Amy could not have cared less where she was sitting when everything went south—but he was already settled in, setting up his laptop on a tray. There was a television screen in front of her. Apparently she could download and watch two hundred fifty movies. That might be more distracting than the pre-flight safety demonstration, which was accomplished (after the attendant announced she was about to do it) entirely in pantomime, some bits of which were apparently intended to be droll. She indicated exits as though voguing; she demonstrated the use of the safety belt by first wrapping it around her head and then wagging her finger no. Passengers ignored her, in marked contrast to the raucous stomping and applause emanating from the economy section, whose attendant was apparently rapping. Max, who loved to fly, would have hated both performances. No one has the right, he would say, to perform anything before a captive audience. He suffered his last hospital stay in a room with two other dying men, both of whom slept through full-blast broadcasts of Night Court, My Two Dads, and Mission Impossible. Amy always shut it off, and the next day it would be on again. The night before he died, Amy unplugged the TV and twisted off one of the prongs with a pair of pliers. He managed a smile then, and a thumbs-up, but Amy couldn’t forgive herself for not doing it earlier.
Ha
ving hours ago researched the soothing effects of biofeedback, she elected to remain physically calm during the runway taxi: her breathing stayed slow and shallow, even at the moment of liftoff, even during the climb. She of course ignored the window. She swallowed and swallowed to ease her protesting ears, and so far it all seemed to be happening to someone else, someone who, though unhappy to be there, was disengaged with the plane’s behavior, disinterested in her own fate. Perhaps this was denial: she had willed herself into it, and now she pretended—successfully—to be engaged in a thought experiment, a virtual flight. That was it: she was virtually on this plane. How clever of her stomach to register virtual weightlessness. As a thought experiment, this was going brilliantly, but she trusted it wouldn’t last. She flagged a passing attendant, scored some sparkling water, and popped one of the Klonopin.
This was in fact her third flight. Her first, a round-trip flight from Boston to Trinidad in 1971, had been pleasant enough. She had been newly married, and she and Max had settled on separate honeymoons—he flew to Madrid and she visited a couple of lovers, one in the Islands, one in the Navy. She had actually enjoyed most of the trip, despite the absurd route (on the way home, on top of the planned stopover in Pensacola, the travel agency had arranged for her to change flights in Atlanta and New York City), and despite the fact that a landing-gear light had at one point malfunctioned, forcing passengers to assume the crash position just in case. Now she could remember the general hilarity on that Eastern flight when the captain told everybody not to panic and a brand-new stewardess, in the middle of describing the crash position, began to shake and cry, her voice rising in volume and pitch, and was wrestled into a seat and strapped in by two burly sailors. Amy had giggled along with the others, imagining, even before the plane touched down, how she would describe the scene to Max. “I was really afraid,” she later told him, “which is probably why the whole thing was so funny.” But she hadn’t been really afraid. She had been twenty-four years old. She had experienced only virtual fear.
Seventeen years later, flying to Rochester, Minnesota with a desperately ill Max, she did not even register the journey out, because they were on their way to Mayo, the Lourdes of the New World, where Amy had convinced herself that Max could get on some experimental program and magically prolong his life. She had focused so grimly on this outcome that when it didn’t happen, when the doctors there were as clueless as they had been at Mass General, as hopeless as Calvary, she, not Max, had broken down, without warning enduring a full-blown panic attack as they lifted off the icy runway, and Max, all skin and bones by then, no muscle tone at all, had held her still by force of will, preventing her from doing something that, he kept assuring her, she would never live down. All the way to Logan he held her, hectoring, cracking jokes, singing songs. He spun scatological tales about the Clinic personnel; made up a silly show tune called “Hold the Mayo”; he dug the Chanson de Roland out of his carry-on and read the whole thing to her in French. The plane’s interior was a poor illusion, a fragile construct, willed into being by all the happy idiots around her, and only Amy could see through to the truth, that there was just this pitiless void, and the two of them inside it, tiny, withering, and Amy shook herself apart almost, and hid her face, herself, in Max. “Now,” he said as they shuffled off the plane in Boston, “don’t you feel silly?”
Now Amy began to relax just a tiny bit. They had been airborne for an hour, and she had admitted and made peace with those terrible airplane sounds, the hum and whine of machines, the insectile chirpings of the pilot, and with the artificial air, and the rhythmic mumble of far-off conversations. There was nothing out the window to frighten her. She took out her notepad again and wrote “Barking at Ants.” She was about to put it away, but then kept writing. This never happened to her—she always let a title settle into her head before fooling with it—but now she was anxious to get started. It would be easy enough to weave Alphonse’s midnight windmill-tilting into a larger story. She was three pages in when she realized that the larger story was trite, a stupid thing about a pathologically even-tempered family with a chronically outraged dog who sniffed out suppressed anger and then for some cartoonish reason took it all into himself. The family—Downtrodden Dad, Frustrated Mom, Warring Children—was terrible, but the dog was great, and Amy tore up the pages and started again. She would write a dog story. Jack London had gotten there first, except that he hadn’t, because his dog only needed to keep his person alive, not happy. He hadn’t had to grapple with human neurosis. Because she stayed in the dog’s POV, the family (unchanged, as boring as ever) became background noise, like that engine whine, little tin food gods, which would have been fine with the dog, except that they expected some sort of daily interaction with him, and the shorter ones couldn’t be counted on to let him outside often enough. He tolerated the gods but hated the house, especially the doors. The house was a metaphysical obscenity. That the gods loved the house was plain, as was the fact that they appreciated that the house was set down and shut off from a larger place. “Outside” was one of their favorite words, along with “inside”: they were always saying them to him in a high pitch, and when he was younger he would bark wildly, knowing that this would get them to open the door, but the aging dog knew better, that outside was no different from inside, and Amy stopped writing because the whole thing was collapsing into some dreadful eco-fable. Also the passenger to her left had snapped his laptop shut and leaned toward her. “Excuse me,” he said, smiling widely, showing her all his teeth. “May I tell you a secret?”
* * *
His name was Patrice Garrotte and he had a number of secrets, foremost of which he spilled immediately. “I recognized you right away,” he said, his voice at once honeyed and reedy; he sounded like Dan Duryea making a prank call, and his Bette Davis eyes were milky brown. At first, he batted his lashes like a belle, but as he honed in on her, he stopped blinking completely. “I’ve read each of your books. Of course I was hesitant to disturb you.” His breath smelled bright green, as though he had just been chewing parsley.
Amy focused on these sensory details in order to disappear into the experience of Patrice Garrotte and so spend precious seconds, perhaps even minutes, doing something besides poke at her dormant pteromechanophobia. Besides Maxine, nobody living had read all her works. Garrotte was old, but younger than she. Besides, how had he recognized her? Was he some sort of plant? Had Maxine sent him?
“You are much lovelier than the photograph on your Facebook page,” he said.
“I don’t have a Facebook page.”
“Actually, you have three, but only one looks authentic, and they all use the same picture. The one in which you’re standing in front of your house.”
What picture? What Facebook page? The authentic one must be Maxine’s work.
Telepathic Patrice Garrotte had already reopened his notebook, typed an imprecation, and now showed her the Facebook page, with Holly Antoon’s hideous snapshot splayed across the upper left corner. On her profile page was an Amy Gallup Photo Album with JPEGS of her old book covers. There were regular posts about scheduled radio interviews and a big stupid thing about the televised CNET show, which, Amy had to remind herself, was due to take place in a few hours. As if. According to this page, Amy had 713 friends, all strangers.
“I take it you’re en route to the Whither Publishing Conference.”
“Unfortunately.” Amy had decided to continue this conversation, in part because she was almost curious, in part because the plane had begun a series of midair hiccups. Passengers walking the aisles grabbed seat backs and righted themselves, pretending—she could see the pretense in the set of their shoulders—that the hiccups were perfectly normal. Amy’s many doomsday scenarios had never included the plane disintegrating without the aid of lightning, a bomb, or another plane, but of course that could turn on a dime, and Patrice Garrotte offered her shelter, slowed her heartbeat. Maybe he would produce a weapon. A little one, incapable of penetrating the skin of t
he plane. A knife. After all, she had had a knife pulled on her before, and that hadn’t worked out badly.
“Are you in … publishing?” she asked him. She already had him pegged as an unpublished writer trolling for connections, or perhaps for a sympathetic ear. Perhaps he had a wrinkled, parsley-stained manuscript secreted about his person. Perhaps she would actually read it.
He laughed, so sharply that a little boy in front of Amy peered over the seat, stared fearfully, and popped down out of sight. Patrice laughed without closing his eyes or taking them off of Amy’s face. How did he keep them moist? Amy found herself wishing for Internet access—which, in fact, she could achieve in seconds through the laptop port before her, only she couldn’t very well search right in front of him for “blink reflex” and find out whether protuberant unblinking eyes were a sign of some organic mental disease. “Not at all,” said Patrice Garrotte. “I am merely a dedicated reader.”
How dedicated? Amy wondered.
“In the most literal sense,” he said. “I am a sponge.” His eyes twinkled, or rather did the parched equivalent of twinkling. “As opposed to a sandglass or strain bag. Sadly, I am not a mogul diamond. Unlike you.”
A sponge, a sandglass. Who was he quoting? Amy had the distinct impression that she had better remember, although she kept speculating about the twinkling mechanism. How do eyes twinkle, anyway? She should definitely write that Twinkle story, the one about her pervy pediatrician. Garrotte’s had the dull satin sheen of dolls’ eyes. Stony eyes, she thought, that in the moon did glitter, and then she got it. “I’m afraid that these days I’m more of a strain bag than a diamond. I’d be content to be a sponge.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge had categorized readers into types. The sandglass reader just reads to pass the time; the strain bag retains only the bits of pulp that haven’t slipped through the net. The sponge was obvious. She couldn’t remember what the mogul diamond was, except that it was the best.
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