by Jeremy Bates
I remember skiing the fall line, cutting a series of fluid S’s through the snow, when Smiley overtook me. I did my best to catch up and was retaking the lead when I accidentally collided into her. I flew off my skis and cartwheeled at breakneck speed down the hill. Even as I was tumbling head over heels, I heard an inexplicably loud WHOOSH, as if dynamite had gone off in the distance. When my momentum slowed, and I came to a rest, I looked up the steep slope—a split second before a moving wall of snow crashed over me.
The next thing I knew I was suspended in an empty blackness, focusing on a bead of light. I continued to focus on the light until it brightened and the darkness around it lightened. I thought it might have been a ray of sunlight pushing through a barricade of black clouds. But as the light stretched and faded and stretched again, I realized it was not the interplay of sunlight and clouds but rather my mind struggling to regain consciousness.
I opened my eyes.
And could see nothing but a stinging whiteness.
My first thought was that I might be blind, and my second thought was that I might be dead, before concluding with relief that I was neither and simply staring at snow a centimeter or two from my face.
At this point I wasn’t yet thinking clearly enough to understand what had happened or why I was cold as a winter gravestone. But it didn’t take long before I recalled the wall of rushing snow and realized I’d been swept up in an avalanche.
Terror came then, saturating me, possessing me, ferocious and unapologetic. My heart rate spiked. I began breathing dangerously fast. I could shift my left arm the slightest bit from the elbow down, and I could wiggle my fingers and toes, but I couldn’t move any other part of my body. It was as though I were encased in cement. This paralysis boosted my terror to a new level.
I screamed for help at the top of my lungs, knowing I was exhausting my finite supply of oxygen but unable to simply lie there and wait to suffocate to death. I continued to scream with everything I had. Yet due to the crushing weight of snow atop me, and my flattened lungs, it became excruciatingly painful to keep this up for long.
My throat burned. It felt as though I were breathing through a heavy cloth. My eyelids grew heavy, but I forced myself to keep them open, knowing that if they closed they would likely never open again.
I’d been skiing ever since I was a child. I’d taken numerous lessons over the years. I’d learned a lot about avalanches, and what to do in the event you became an unfortunate victim of one. One piece of advice was to spit so you know up from down. I spat now. The saliva struck the snow just below my mouth, which meant I was facing down. I’d also learned that you should urinate so the rescue dogs can find you. But I doubted doing so would help. In the words of one of my instructors: if you’re looking for someone who’s been covered by an avalanche for more than eleven minutes, then you’re looking for a corpse.
How long had I been buried? I wondered. Five minutes? Ten? Did I only have one minute left to live? This seemed impossible. So utterly unfair and impossible. I wasn’t supposed to die. I was going to start looking for my first real job soon. I was going to start my own business one day. I’d already told my brothers I would hike the Appalachian Trail with them the following summer. I’ve never even owned a car! Dozens of other abstract thoughts came and went in a mad flurry as my unrealized future, not my past, flashed before my eyes, and then as a quiet, peaceful darkness folded me into its embrace, my final coherent thought was: What a shame…
∆∆∆
Even as I felt myself sliding comfortably into sleep on flight JL077, I continued to think about the 2001 ski trip. Although I hadn’t known it at the time, Smiley, eight feet above me, had heard my screaming and was frantically working to dig me out with nothing but her gloved hands. After about fifteen minutes she discovered my right arm. When she reached my head and found me lying facedown, she dug the rest of my body out before rolling me over and performing CPR.
As the aircraft rattled through another pocket of turbulence, my semi-waking thoughts transitioned to a dream, and I watched the action unfolding on the mountain, watched as Smiley gave me the kiss of life over and over again until, miraculously, I opened my eyes and sucked a huge mouthful of air into my bruised lungs.
I don’t remember much of what happened next—the moments after being resuscitated were a haze—but in this dream I kissed Smiley like I did almost every time I dreamed about her, and she kissed me back—even as I did my best to ignore the foreboding knowledge that it would be me who would kill her in a few hours’ time.
∆∆∆
More turbulence shook the 787, ejecting me from sleep. I pushed myself upright, my heart in my throat, feeling as though I were strapped into a too-tight corset.
A dream, I told myself with a mix of fading dread and immeasurable relief. I curled the fingers of my right hand, which were still stiff from the frostbite they’d suffered twenty years ago.
I conjured Miley Laffont’s face as I remembered it, her amused blue eyes and elfish features framed by locks of flaxen golden hair. And of course her oversized smile, hence her nickname.
As much as it pleased me to think about Smiley, if I did so for too long the pain would come, the guilt and regret and self-loathing that she was gone and I was responsible for that sad fact, and so I reluctantly let go of the image of her.
From the Sky Suite next to mine came a deep, wheezy snore.
I clunked my seat to the upright position. According to the clock on the media screen, it was now 2:35 p.m. I’d been asleep for almost two hours.
Another snore, almost a snort.
Finding it hard to imagine such a boorish sound coming from the petite Hallie Smith, I peeked over the privacy panel—and blinked in surprise.
A man who must have been pushing three hundred pounds sat in her seat.
Chapter 2
The stranger’s silky silver hair was shorn short. The beginnings of a salt-white beard dusted his meaty jowls. His oily eyelids were closed while a fine trickle of drool leaked from the corner of his lips.
So immense was this man’s girth, I couldn’t be certain poor Hallie Smith might not be squished like a pancake beneath him. The flippant thought recalled when I was trapped beneath tons of unyielding snow, and I brushed it from my mind.
The plane jounced, causing the luggage in the overhead bins to slip and slide.
The man opened one eye, pirate-like.
We stared at each other for an uncomfortably long moment.
I cleared my throat and faced forward in my seat, frowning.
Where had Hallie Smith gone?
I looked toward the front of the cabin. I didn’t see her standing in either of the aisles. Not that this would answer why the big man had taken her seat. You simply didn’t annex vacated seats on airplanes.
Had she voluntarily swapped seats with him then?
Because of me?
But…why? I had done nothing inappropriate. I replayed our conversation from beginning to end, searching for a potential faux pas. I could discover none. I had been taciturn and polite. Nothing I had said or done would have been cause for her to—
Maybe it hadn’t been Hallie’s decision to move then, I thought. Maybe it had been the fat man’s…or the person seated next to the fat man. The snoring fat man.
Pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. The fat man had been snoring most of the flight. The person next to him had complained to the cabin crew, who had decided to move him to a different seat. And who better to move him next to than a man who was sleeping himself?
Anger built inside me.
So now I had to put up with this man’s snoring for the next several hours?
I scavenged through my carry-on bag for my noise-cancelling headphones—realizing belatedly I had packed them in my checked suitcase. I tried on the ones the airline had provided. They didn’t do the job, and I tossed them back in the storage nook.
The fat man snorted—once, twice…three times!—and just when I was be
coming hopeful he might have expelled the last of the nasal congestion from his system, he began that deep, bovine breathing once more.
I think not, I decided, glancing at the call button above me. Had I been seated in cattle class, in which the cabin attendant to passenger ratio couldn’t be better than 50:1, I would have waited for a stewardess to pass me by. Now I jabbed the button. After all, I wasn’t after butler service; I had a legitimate complaint.
While I waited for the flight attendant to arrive, I went over in my head what I was going to say to her. Demand the fat man return to his proper seat? Request a different seat myself? I wasn’t going to be rude about it. The flight attendant who’d transplanted the man beside me was just doing her job…only she wasn’t, was she? Not really. She’d put him there to make her job easier. So she didn’t have to deal with the passenger who’d complained about him in the first place.
The flight attendant who appeared at my Sky Suite half a minute later was pretty, peppy, and young—all requirements to be a flight attendant with JAL. “How can I help you?” she asked me.
I hooked a thumb at the big man in the adjacent Sky Suite and said, “He is not supposed to be sitting there.” My voice straddled the line between indignation and conspiratorial.
The flight attendant seemed surprised by this statement, which meant she hadn’t been the one who’d sanctioned the swap. “Excuse me, sir?” she said.
“At the beginning of the flight,” I explained, “a woman was sitting there. Now she is not. Did she change seats?”
“I don’t think so. She shouldn’t have. Are you…sure?”
The fat man snored, a honking, bubbly sound.
I made an amused face. “I can differentiate between a petite British woman and…” I let her fill in the blank.
“I’m sorry for this inconvenience,” she said. “Let me check the passenger manifest. I’ll be back shortly.”
While I waited for her to return, I plucked the in-flight shopping magazine from the seat pocket in front of me and browsed through the items for sale: pearls, watches, shawls, neckties, cosmetics, fragrances. Ballantine’s whisky was on offer, and I made a mental note to ask my colleagues in the marketing department if it would be worth our time getting Glenfiddich into airline magazines.
I was admiring a Polo Ralph Lauren scarf (though at twenty thousand yen it was a little on the pricey side) when the perky flight attendant stopped in the aisle next to my neighbor’s Sky Suite. She bent close to him and spoke sotto voce.
The man woke with a nasty throat-clear. “Huh?” he grunted.
“I’m sorry to wake you, sir,” she said. “Are you Tony Musset?”
“Yeah. Something wrong?”
“No, not at all. Thank you for the confirmation.”
The flight attendant came around to my suite. “It appears all the passengers are in their correct seats, sir,” she told me.
I was frowning. “But what happened to the woman who was seated there? Where is she now?”
“Do you know her name? I can check—”
“Hallie,” I said. “Hallie Smith.”
While the flight attendant scanned the printouts in her hands, the big man scowled over the privacy partition at me. “Something wrong?” he said.
“Why did you change seats?” I asked.
“Huh?” he grunted.
I wasn’t going to get into an argument over it with him. To the flight attendant, I said, “It does not matter.”
She glanced up from the printouts. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I am sure.”
She bowed twice, appearing relieved to have avoided a potentially embarrassing situation, then moved on to resume her duties elsewhere.
The fat man, who was still glaring over the privacy screen at me, settled back into his seat.
I opened the JAL SHOP magazine again. I wasn’t able to focus on any of the pages and set it aside. While I’d been sleeping, the Fasten Seatbelt sign had been turned off. I stood and pulled on my tweed jacket. Most airlines had a 1-2-1 layout in business class, to ensure each passenger had direct aisle access. This aircraft had a 2-2-2 configuration, though due to the jagged alignment of the rows, my window seat had its own little walkway to the aisle, allowing me to bypass the fat man without disturbing him.
The cabin’s aqua mood lighting was currently set to low. Most windows were dimmed to an opaque navy, creating the illusion of being in a cocoon at the bottom of the sea. The dozen or so passengers seated behind me either wore headphones or were sleeping.
Hallie Smith was not among them.
I started up the aisle toward the front of the cabin, wondering what I’d do when I saw her. Smile? Stop for a chat? I preferred not to socialize in quiet public spaces, such as the aisle of an airplane, but at least I’d find out why she’d moved seats.
Many of the big entertainment screens I passed were playing Hollywood films or Japanese manga. Several passengers were sleeping. A few were working on laptops or tablets.
No blonde British woman anywhere.
I counted two empty seats. Given both lavatories at the front of the cabin were occupied, the Sherlock Holmes inside me deduced she must be in one or the other.
I stopped near the door to the lavatory at the end of my aisle. Deciding it might be embarrassing for Hallie Smith to bump into me just as she got off the toilet, I parted the thick bulkhead curtains and stepped into the galley.
The flight attendant who’d fetched the passenger manifest for me was there.
“Oh,” she said, surprised by my appearance. She snapped closed a clam-shaped mirror and slipped it, as well as a tube of cherry-red lipstick, into a pocket in her jacket. “Can I get you something?”
“So this is where you hide so you do not have to deal with passengers like me,” I said in jest.
“You are a very good passenger,” she said.
“Sorry to involve you in that situation earlier. It really does not matter.”
“That’s okay. That’s my job.”
I found I could barely look away from her chestnut eyes.
“Watashi no namae wa Gaston Green desu,” I said.
“You can speak Japanese?” she said, impressed. “Watashi wa Okubo. Hajimemashite!”
“Hajimemashite,” I replied. Then, “You have a lovely name. I do not think I have ever met an Okubo before.”
She blushed. “Do you come to Japan often?”
“About once a month. I have not seen you on this flight.”
“I’ve just been transferred from the Tokyo-Brisbane route. Are you sure there isn’t something I can get you?”
“How about a drink?”
“O-nomimono wa nani ni nasaimasu ka?”
I translated out loud. “What would I honorably like for my honorable drink?”
“Your Japanese is excellent!”
“A whisky, please, neat.”
Okubo opened one of the galley’s smaller storage containers and produced a bottle of Suntory Hibiki 17, which she held up for my inspection.
“Mon Dieu!” I said. “I thought Suntory had discontinued that brand years ago.”
“Maybe this is an old bottle? Would you prefer something else?”
“No, no, please.” Due to its rarity, the street value of Hibiki 17 was about a grand a bottle.
To my amusement, Okubo poured two fingers into a plastic cup, though I said nothing of her choice of glassware—or plasticware. She handed me the cup. I sniffed the whisky, then took a sip, pleased with the smooth flavor. “Excellent,” I said.
Okubo bowed.
“I suppose I should let you get back to work.” I raised the whisky. “Merci, madame.”
“If there is anything else, please let me know.”
I made to leave the galley, though I hesitated at the curtain. I turned back to her. “Have you heard of a sushi restaurant named Matsuoka?”
“In Ginza, yes. Isn’t it very expensive?”
“I have an event organized there on Thursday. I woul
d feel rather foolish attending it by myself—would you by chance be in Tokyo then?”
Okubo’s already large eyes seemed to double in size. She didn’t say anything.
I didn’t know how to take this and stammered, “I am, uh, I am sorry, I should not have—”
“No,” she said quickly. “I mean, yes. Yes. I’m working this weekend, but I’ll be back on Monday and in Tokyo until Friday. So yes, yes, I’m here on Thursday.”
“Fantastic! What is your number? I will call you.”
She recited the digits but seemed skeptical I would remember them. “I can find a pen—”
“Do not worry, madame, I have an excellent memory for numbers—”
Just then the curtain behind Okubo opened and one of the European-looking cabin attendants entered. She gave me a quick up-and-down, then whispered something in Japanese to Okubo I didn’t catch, though it sounded work-related.
Not wanting to get Okubo in trouble for socializing with a passenger, I raised the glass of whisky, said, “Arigatou,” and left the galley.
∆∆∆
The lavatory on my side of the aisle was now vacant
I entered it, sliding the lock closed behind me, which automatically activated the overhead fluorescents. Looking at my reflection in the mirror, I ran a hand through my thick brown hair, then smiled, to make sure I hadn’t had any beef from lunch stuck in between my teeth while I’d been speaking with Okubo. Nothing, thankfully. I kept the smile in place for a few moments, because it wasn’t every day that I smiled at myself. Presently, the smile didn’t reach my golden-brown eyes—it could probably be described as more of a strained grimace—but I had been told by enough women that it was one of my best features. These same women had also told me they liked my eyes. Admittedly, they could be compassionate, intelligent, and lively, sometimes all three at the same time. Yet if you knew what you were looking for, you could detect the pain in them as well.
I noticed the Shiseido amenities arranged neatly near the corner of the sink: moisturizer, lotion, and mouthwash. I used all of them, then urinated while studying the toilet seat’s control panel, which featured three buttons displaying pictograms of people getting water shot up their anuses. These buttons were ubiquitous on bidets across Japan, though I’d never been brave enough to push one.