Dear American Airlines

by Jonathan Miles

  But I digress. My aim here was to acquaint you with Walenty, since, for the moment, he seems to be all I have in the world, but I veered into some related humbuggeries and lost track of him. Sigh. Nonetheless, I'm afraid you'll have to permit me my digressions. Digressing, after all, is not so different from rerouting, and let's not pretend, dear ones, that you're innocent of that.

  ***

  Dear American Airlines, since when did you start canceling flights in midair? The plane from New York to Chicago was one of those "streamlined" contraptions roughly the size and shape of an econo-model dildo. We circled O'Hare for an hour before the pilot informed us he was landing in Peoria. Peoria! In my youth I thought Peoria was a fictional place that Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis had cooked up one night at the tail end of a gin bender. But no, it exists. We sat on the runway for more than an hour before a handsome pilot with exquisitely parted hair emerged to tell us that the flight was "officially canceled." Wha? But he offered us all a bus ride to O'Hare "on the house," kind soul that he was, the revealing of which I hope won't endanger his job. Not that I'd worry too much about him: Go ahead and can him, he has a guaranteed second career as a JCPenney catalog model. The (alleged) cause for this fuckedupedness was (allegedly) foul weather blowing off Lake Michigan but after eight-plus hours in Chicago I can tell you, without a pinch of hesitation, that the weather here is flat-out delightful and you're more than welcome to visit for a round of golf to so verify. Pack some sunscreen.

  Yet all around me this nation's stranded folk are badgering ticket agents, muffling their children's whining by stuffing the local variety of hot dogs into their small mouths, checking and rechecking their watches, and, most of all, inexhaustibly bitching into cellphones. Every now and then I walk twenty yards or so to check the schedule screens. I'm not alone in this chore but I do seem to be the only one unequipped with a cellphone. No big shakes there, as I've already made my one call—it didn't go so well—and I'm anyway loyal to payphones. I stand beneath the screens like a child waiting for Santa's sleigh to appear in the night sky, examining each star for the faintest trace of movement, ears overattuned to the jingle of far-off bells. But the screens barely flicker. All flights westward canceled, eastward canceled, everything canceled. The sky above us one giant fermata, an interminable chord lying wounded in the middle of a song, a deadening hollow thrummmmm

  ***

  Stella is probably laughing about this. Stella the elder, I mean. Not a happy, lilting laugh: no, more like an acidic, I-told-you-so laugh, as in hahaha once an asshole always an asshole haha ... ha. The sort of laugh that's sometimes mistaken for a cough or a cancer symptom. Did I mention she was beautiful once? Well, she was. Like the leading lady from a Bogart flick, so I thought back then, with a finely sculpted aristocrat's jaw and eyes as deep, blue, and cold as the North Atlantic glimpsed through a submarine's porthole. The thin lips of a killer and a long narrow ivory neck. A demure chocolate mole on her inner thigh that I blithely befriended. Would it still remember me? Hard to believe that it, at least, wouldn't welcome me home: Hello darlin'. In our lazy postcoital tangles I swear I used to breathe Stella, as if inhaling her aerosolized essence, trying to flood my lungs with her. Surely you remember what that's like: lying there in the wet dark, unafraid for the first time in your life, drenched in a balmy peace, content to die. But then, stop, it's useless and mawkish to dwell on such things, right-rightright. Buck up, Bennie. So every tomato has its soft spot, big whoop. You were young like everyone else. Quit making mountains out of moles.

  It happened like this: I was twenty-four, she twenty-seven. I'd dropped out of grad school the year before to embark upon a career in romantic dissolution, spending nine- and ten-hour daily stretches in a narrow, gummy cockpit of an Uptown New Orleans bar called Billy Barnes' Turf Exchange. The Exchange, for short, and goddamn what a saloon: ancient coonass bruisers drinking away disability checks, weird old frilly bats from the neighborhood sipping Chambord or Campari, off-duty line cooks and oyster shuckers, displaced hippies, slumming Tulane kids, greasy pool sharks, a cigar-smoking Rottweiler named Punch, Seersucker Bob who never wore anything but, Skee-zacks who used his trumpet as a beer bong, Dead Fred whose ashes were behind the bar, Spud, Pete the Spy, Al the Horny Wheelchair Homo, Bum's Breath Mike (B. B. Mike for short), Crazy Jane, me too. Our ringmaster was Felix, the owner, a doughy, hairless connoisseur of dirty jokes and fry-batter who would take out his false teeth for a dollar. He called himself Felix the Fat so we did the same. Tuesday was Ladies' Night, the only night Felix would spring for a band, and there'd be so many halter tops a-bouncing on the dancefloor that you felt like you were inside a lottery ball machine. But those nights were the exception. Mostly it was a dim, garrulous joint, filled with neighborhood steadies and worn chatter and smogged with tobacco smoke and cuss words, as comfortable, rank, and beloved as the ratty old pair of house slippers you slide on to fetch the morning news. How I adored it! Back then I was broke, sloshed, undernourished, unwashed, intermittently suicidal, but more generally, and sometimes rhapsodically, happy as hell: what the French call l'extase langoureuse, the ecstasy of languishing.

  Stella was the cool opposite: sharp, ambitious, level, metrical, severe. An aspiring poet like me, though the style & substance of her poems were the obverse of mine. When we met I was coediting a small doomed lit journal called Rag and Bone Shop and she'd just started work on her master's at Tulane. My coeditor's apartment on Magazine Street—his name was Charles Ford; everyone assumed we were brothers—doubled as the R&BS offices, and it was there, at one of the parties we always threw after picking the issues up from the printer, that Stella and I met. We'd published two of her poems in that edition of R&BS—one about a quilt, sort of, and the other, very literally, about a bottlecap crucifix. It was the former poem that intrigued me, because it ended with a scene of a woman having sex atop her great-grandmother's hand-stitched quilt, "staining it with creation," which struck me as a lovely and vaguely kinky line and made me curious about its author.

  Her hair was braided that night and she was wearing a blousy silk shirt and bluejeans. On the hi-fi: Nick Lowe, the Specials, the Buzzcocks, Ian Dury & the Blockheads. A baroque glass bong circling the kitchen and a local medievalist performing a second line on his way to the potty. We ended up on Charles's balcony overlooking Magazine, Stella and I, sitting on a porch swing with our feet propped on the balcony rail, bubbly drunk. What did we talk about? Who knows. The dis-and-dat of two creatures commencing a mating dance. Crazy mothers (ah, she had one too). James Merrill. Time travel. A shared fondness for neon. My enigmatic coeditor, her downblouse-peering old roach of a thesis advisor. Oh, and yes, I learned she'd never set foot inside the Exchange! Gallantly, I promised to take her. Later, while we were kissing, I opened my eyes to the sight of Charles's naked pale rump pressed flat against the window. From inside I could hear him singing, "When da moon hiz your eye...," and so on and so forth.

  We were the last to leave the party. Inside we found Charles passed out openmouthed on his couch, and after carefully sliding down his boxers and finding a marker, we wrote a poem on his ass: Roses are red / violets are blue / with my buttocks so white /1 bid you goodnight. (Stella would later disavow her participation in this act, citing it as one of the early missed clues of my un-suitability as husband, father, gentleman, etc., but I vividly remember her right thumb curled around the elastic of Charles's boxers, and the brutal glee she seemed to be stifling, because I was surprised [and aroused] by the sexual birr she brought to the task, the way her involvement tipped it, from boozy conception up to the moment we began writing, from frathouse-style prank to dark-edged violation ... anyway, she denies it.) Downstairs on the sidewalk I kissed Stella some more—those cliffhanger kisses, you know, when you feel as if you'll drop to your doom if your tongues untwine—before she sank into the seat of her car and disappeared. Then I stood there for a long while, my heart a sparkler spraying light across the sidewalk.

  ***

 
Yet I'm veering off-point once again, aren't I? French-style kisses & whatnot, kerphooey. Dear American Airlines, I apologize. Please understand that these are not the best of times. Outside, by the luggage porters, an elderly woman who was smoking beside me just told me the most dismal of tales: Her husband suffered a "coronary" while driving and plunged his Fiat off a central California cliff but thanks to his seatbelt was saved from dying and was instead reduced to a vegetative state now going on four years. His dear munchkin of a wife sits with him for six hours a day waiting for the random blink of an eyelid that will return him to the mammalian. As she told me this she dug a packet of Kleenex out of her fannypack which I presumed was for her—that story awarded her the right to shed tears—but which she offered to me. I've never been adept at keeping my heart from advertising itself on my sleeve, and I guess I was wearing that wounded, onion-stink expression to which I'm prone. I started to decline the gift but she was rifling through her fannypack for something else. I was hoping it wouldn't be a still-life photo of her ventilated, intubated husband because that risked provoking a fit of blubbering from me. Instead it was a little machine resembling an overweight BlackBerry phone which she explained was a handheld slot machine. This was what kept her sane, she told me, and urged me to take a few spins—in the "virtual" sense, of course—which I did. A cherry, a seven, and what looked like a lemon! Two sevens and a cherry! Loss and more loss. The munchkin said all life requires of us, "by George," is to find one reason a day to go on. Besides playing the little video slot machine, she said, she makes sure to always have something coming in the mail such as a sweater from L.L.Bean or a new garden trowel from Smith & Hawken. To always be expecting. Before heading back inside—"I hear they're running short on cots for us strandees," she said—she told me the Kleenex was mine and advised me to keep my upper lip stiff. Followed literally this advice tends to make one appear on the brink of a sneeze but nevermind the literal. The old woman gave me her tissues and I'm doing what she says.

  ***

  Mind if we check in with Walenty? For just a minute or two while my lip holds sdiff like dis. Here he is on [>], having just stepped off the train in Trieste:

  He was unprepared for the raw color of it all. For three years he had seen no color except for the beef-red of wounds and crimson splashes of blood; everything else had been painted in hard, parched shades of gray and brown and black. Mud, gunmetal, rust, smoke, night, char, concertina wire, shovels, ash, corpse-skin, fog, mortar shells, bones, the sharp-ribbed mongrels that cowered growling behind rubble piles. Stepping off the train now, however, was like passing through a rainbow. The station itself, yellow like a daisy, was charged with color: here the gaudy flash of summer silks, there the rose-colored fringe of a woman's drawstring purse, here the phosphorescent gloss of a businessman's navy suit, and strewn across the waxed floors were the salmon-hued confetti of discarded tickets.

  ("Confetti": a tiny liberty that I'm taking. Alojzy has it as śaiąteczne odpadki, which translated literally means "festive trash." But what trash is more festive than confetti? Ah, the pinprick joys of translating. Anyway, onward...)

  Walenty's eyes stung him, and he nearly lost his breath. Save for the few Kiwi soldiers posted in the corners, and the deadness of his false foot as his shoe scraped the floor, there was nothing to suggest that the war had been anything but a sour nightmare.

  He sat down at a table in a café inside the station and, still dizzy and overwhelmed, held the table edge to steady himself. The young girl who came to take his order was dark-haired, with tanned glossy skin, and the pureness of her expression—a mix of boredom, dreaminess, and tender ignorance—made clear to him that she had lost nothing in life, not yet. He noticed a small, fish-shaped scar on her elbow: probably from a childhood fall. No doubt she had cried—the grating, screechy cries he'd associated with children before he went to war, before he'd heard what children are capable of. Deep howls of total vacuumed loss.

  "Do you have coffee?" he asked.

  "Yes," she said.

  "Surrogato?"

  "No. Coffee."

  "Please, then. A cup."

  When she returned to deliver his coffee, he noticed her lingering and staring shyly at his prosthetic leg, at his exposed mechanical ankle. His eyes caught hers. "Does it hurt?" she asked finally.

  "No," he said. "It doesn't hurt. Not anymore. It just reminds me of hurt. Like a memory that sits right in the front of your brain and can't be budged or extinguished." He did not want to drive her off, to have her think he was a melancholy cripple, the cliché of the wounded soldier, so he smiled. His smile, however, was lopsided and awkward, as if the muscles of his jaw had forgotten their old routine. He hoped it hadn't seemed a leer.

  She nodded inscrutably and went off to service other tables. When she returned he ordered another cup, and when she brought it to him he said, "Do you know what's strange?" She waited, so he went on: "In my dreams I always have two legs. I think that's the worst part. Every morning, after dreaming, I awaken a full man. But then I reach down and feel my false leg and everything that happened to me happens all over again, in that instant, as though every day I am losing my leg and my comrades for the first time. That's the worst part. I dream backwards."

  He did not expect the girl to smile at this, but she did. Lightly, she said, "You need new dreams," as if it was self-evident, as if he had said he was hungry and she'd recommended food. She'd made it sound simple.

  It's not simple, of course, but you certainly can't blame Walenty for hoisting his hopes up. How pleasant to think of the past as something curable, as a benign rather than malignant cancer, no? Almost as pleasant a concept as a world in which tickets costing $392.68 earned you passage to your destination on the date printed on the ticket. But just as goddamn unlikely.

  ***

  Since we're sort of on the subject of hindsight, dear American Airlines, why don't we discuss how this mess could have been avoided? We won't bother with your official excuse of rotten weather because I've plainly unmasked that one with my frequent measuring of the climate outside, which, at last check, showed a mix of cool and pleasant with a ninety percent chance of continued pleasantness developing through the morning, with winds, like your flight schedules, light and variable. So talk to me. Did banal old greed induce you to overschedule your flights, à la bank robbers unable to stop stuffing their bags despite the wails of nearing sirens? (Peek into that corner office. Do you see fat men eyeing your national route map while twirling handlebar mustaches? Then the answer is probably yes.) Or do you plan so tightly and rigidly that the delay of one plane in, say, Dallas can cause a monumental backup akin to a stalled tractor-trailer on the George Washington Bridge at 8:30 A.M.? Or, similarly, are airlines like yourself susceptible to something like the Butterfly Effect, so that the delay caused by a pickled passenger trying to board an early-morning flight in Ibiza can provoke a chain reaction, with delay piling upon delay, and then cancellation upon cancellation, until poor Chicago O'Hare—the sacrificial goat of air travel—is shut down completely? If that's the case, maybe I'm being too hard on you. Perhaps my beef is actually with Señor Fabio Eurotrash who rolled off a foam-strewn Ibiza dancefloor at six A.M. with sixteen Red-Bull-and-vodkas still fizzing in his gut and whose clumsy pre-takeoff attempt at self-fellatio in Seat 3A forced an interminable delay while his pretzeled ass was removed from the plane. But then why stop there? The beauty of hindsight is that it's infinite. After all, you could reasonably if acidly retort that this entire hash is my fault because twenty years ago I flushed my life down the toilet. Zing! Good one, AA. Or, stepping further back, that it's Willa Desforge's fault for letting a disconsolate-eyed Polack impregnate her one unairconditioned night midcentury in New Orleans. Ouch, sucker-punch! Funny thing is, though, Miss Willa would agree with you on that one. If she could somehow connect the dots, my mother would fix the blame for everything from Pol Pot to global warming to the undarned holes in her socks on that one humid unguarded night that was the end o
f her and the beginning of me.

  And it began, truth to tell, with a possum. Sit tight, I have a story to tell. Apparently we have time.

  Miss Willa Desforge met Henryk Gniech at her parents' home on South Tonti Street in 1953 courtesy of, yessir, a possum: a fat, spooked creature with mottled fur that was neither gray nor brown nor white but a splotchy and disheveled mixture of the three, and with a long fleshy tail almost obscene in its nude pinkness. The possum had taken up residence in the attic directly above Miss Willa's bedroom, and, despite weeks of grumbly and intermittent efforts, my grandfather, a trust and estate attorney for a white-shoe Uptown firm, had been incapable of banishing it from the house. So one Saturday morning he borrowed the neighbor's ladder and patched every hole and rotted edge of the roof soffits and fascias with scrap wood and squares of rumpled aluminum, barring (he thought) any further access by the possum. But possums are nocturnal, so instead of watching my grandfather seal the attic from up in a tree or behind a trashcan, as Gerald Desforge, Esq., imagined, the possum watched from inside the dark attic as the specks of infiltrating sunlight steadily disappeared from its lair, like stars fizzling to black in the night sky. That evening, beginning just after twilight and lasting deep into the wee hours, the Desforges were treated to an unusually raucous performance on the ceiling above Miss Willa's bed: scritches, scratches, hyper-agitated scurries. "It's trapped and it's frantic," my mother said, but my grandfather was unsympathetic. "It will be over soon enough," he said. "How long can it last up there?"