Sing Them Home

by Stephanie Kallos

  It hasn’t been a problem really.

  True, Professor Jones’s fear of flying may have kept her from cultivating the kind of egocentric visibility that many acamedicians crave: appearances at various conferences both in the States and overseas, sitting on panels, presenting papers, that sort of thing. Who cares? That’s not Larken’s style. Furthermore, she does enough mandatory schmoozing at home; she’s not about to fly halfway around the world to have cocktails.

  Curbside, Jon reminds her to stay in touch. “I’ll be expecting daily e-mail updates.”

  “Is there anything you want me to bring back from your homeland?” she asks, ignoring the time, ignoring everything but the movie that’s playing in her head, based on the real-life tragedy involving the crash of a jet carrying a group of University of Nebraska college students and their professors to England to study the landscape paintings of Turner and Constable and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of portraitists. There are no survivors. “A case of Marmite? A gift assortment of biscuits and cheese? Tony Blair’s head on a platter?”

  He laughs and kisses her on the cheek. “Just bring yourself, Larken. Safe journey.”

  Larken steals a last look at Esmé—flushed and jowly, wisps of hair matted to her forehead—and then heads inside.

  Even though the Lincoln Municipal Airport is small (planes depart and arrive from Gates 1, 2, 3, and 4), and theirs is the only flight leaving at this time, Larken nonetheless insisted in her titular role as group leader that students arrive ABSOLUTELY NO LATER THAN 4:45 A.M. When she pulls her luggage into the ticketing area at 5:30 to find that all of the students have not only arrived, but are checked in and waiting in a clump at the foot of the escalators, she feels like shit.

  Luckily no one notices her at first. The kids—who’d be comatose if asked to come to a class this early—are upbeat, animated, and chatty in that self-involved carefree way of college students on holiday. There are a few sets of older adults, presumably parents, lurking around the fringes of the group; their expressions—sheepish, grim, amused, wistful—reveal everything about their relationships with these adult children, to whom they are now nearly invisible, expendable.

  Mirabella Piacenti, the other faculty member on the trip, stands among the students, laughing, talking, poised, tall; she gives the impression of somehow being both of them and apart from them. It’s a quality Larken lacks.

  Larken slinks toward the ticket counter, hoping to go unnoticed at least until after she gets her boarding pass. But Misty Ariel Kroger suddenly pivots and glares at her, giving the impression of a penitentiary guard eyeballing an escaping prisoner through the sights of a rifle. She stares Larken down for longer than necessary, her face expressing a perverse satisfaction; then whispers something to Mirabella—who looks up and waves across the expanse, princess-style.

  Larken waves back. “Sorry I’m late!” she half-mouths, half-speaks, and then immediately regrets it: When in the presence of students, never, ever apologize.

  But then, her position has already been weakened. The tone has already been set. Mirabella was here on time—the good, reliable parent—while Larken was tardy. Stupid. She’ll have to work like hell to recover her authority.

  She mimes her intention to check in at the ticket counter. Mirabella nods and smiles and then turns her attention back to the students. She looks remarkably fresh, as if getting up at four in the morning is de rigueur. Who knows? Maybe it is. Just as Larken makes sure that her colleagues know next to nothing about her personal life, she knows next to nothing about theirs. She hopes Mirabella doesn’t expect them to become fast friends during this trip. Besides surviving the flight, Larken has no desire to do anything other than teach Arthur’s syllabus, visit the Tate, and hunker down with whatever trashy paperback romance catches her eye at the airport concession store.

  “One of your bags is overweight,” the ticket agent remarks after Larken shows her ID.

  “What do you mean?

  “We have a fifty-pound limit for checked baggage. You can either pay extra or you’ll have to step aside and repack.”

  “Repack?” The thought is horrendous. It took Larken forever to figure out what to bring and she’s still not sure she’s got everything she’ll need. “I’ll just pay the fine,” she sighs. “How much?”

  “Here’s your boarding pass, Miss Jones,” the agent says after collecting Larken’s money. “Upstairs to Gate Three.”

  “Let’s head upstairs, everyone!” Larken hears Mirabella announce, and there’s a mass migration toward the escalators. Mirabella lingers behind and they ride up together.

  “Good morning,” she says. “Tough getting going this early, isn’t it?”

  Larken is irritated by extremely beautiful and statuesque women who also happen to be kind. “Thanks for getting the kids all checked in.”

  “It’s going to be a great trip. I’m very excited.”

  As they approach security, Larken remains in the rear and takes her cues from the students. She watches them strip off their coats, remove laptops from their cases, place keys and cell phones and spare change in a plastic bowl, take off accessories with alarm-triggering potential: earrings, nose rings, belly rings, metal-studded wrist bands. Nothing beeps or dings or wails. Perhaps flying post-9/11 skies isn’t as terrifying as she’d thought.

  But when she goes through, an alarm sounds. Instantly the eyes of the entire group of departing passengers are upon her. As if this weren’t a large enough audience, the waiting area is flooded with disembarking passengers. She is asked about the contents of her pockets. “I think they’re empty,” she mutters, but goes through them just to make sure: lint, crumpled napkins, a ticket stub from Terminator 3, candy wrappers. She tries again, and again her guilt is loudly proclaimed. She is ushered to one side and told that she’ll have to be wanded.

  “Out here?” she asks, terrified. “In front of everyone?”

  She’s instructed to place her feet just so and extend her arms to the side. This is what being put in the stocks must have been like.

  Meanwhile, Mirabella passes through the portal silently and with grace. One of those seasoned transcontinental travelers—Larken knows this much about Professor Piacenti: She has a cottage in Tuscany where she goes every summer with her law professor husband and their two young children—Mirabella wears Italian leather boots and a flowing taupe-colored ensemble accessorized with a silk scarf. Larken suspects this outfit to be part of a coordinated collection of clothing, an array of separates in nonwrinkling, lightweight fabric that can be reconfigured in an instant, allowing the fashion-conscious globe-trotter to go from a day at the museum to a night on the town with ease and elegance and the use of a single compact suitcase. Larken packed an iron.

  “Good-bye, Mom!” she hears one girl call, and this intiates a call-and-response litany between the students and their parents.

  Good-bye, Dad! Good-bye, Honey! I love you! I love you, too! Call us as soon as you get there, okay? Be safe! Have fun! Drop us a postcard! We’ll miss you! Have a good flight! Good-bye! Good-bye! Good-bye!

  Larken is once again sent to the back of the line.

  Finally, sans MBTs, she passes inspection.

  “May I please change places?” Larken asks the flight attendant, who is frazzled-looking, well into her fifties; Larken imagines that she’s been at this occupation since flight attendants were called stewardesses; over time, her body seems to have adapted and evolved in relation to her surroundings; her backside has expanded to the exact width of the aisle.

  “I can’t be in the middle,” she says, lowering her voice to a whisper. “I get claustrophobic. I have … anxiety issues.”

  “You’ll have to be patient, ma’am,” the attendant says. She’s slightly out of breath, and her determinedly sweet voice only accentuates her obvious annoyance. “We need to get everyone on the plane first.”

  “I’ll take the middle, Professor Jones,” Drew offers.

  “That’s kind of you, Mr. McNeeley.
”

  Having an aisle seat should help, but after buckling up, Larken experiences a tingling sensation that begins in the soles of her feet and soon starts to metastasize. It’s as though an inoculate containing millions of gerbils has been shot into her nervous system. They start racing up and down the meridians of her spine, her arms, her legs, collecting en masse to ride a merry-go-round in the vicinity of her sacrum, a riot of furtive rodent energy, scuttling across the slippery surfaces of her insides with their tiny boned and clawed feet.

  “Larken, are you all right?” It’s Mirabella, across the aisle, with her velvety maternal voice and her Italian accent.

  Pissed as hell even as it’s happening, Larken starts to hyperventilate. She feels tears leaking from her eyes as she clasps Mirabella’s hand.

  “Larken?” Mirabella repeats, her face apprehensive.

  Larken tries to speak, but cannot.

  It’s such a cheat being a European foreigner in the USA. People love you no matter what. Students are fascinated by your exoticism. Colleagues reward you with tenure and then fall to pieces under your compassionate eye.

  Larken becomes aware of an arm encircling her waist, bracing her back, and of being almost lifted off her feet. She allows herself to be steered down the aisle, dimly aware that everyone else is seated and staring at her.

  “Don’t worry,” Mirabella says in a low voice, “they’ll think we’re just going to freshen our lipsticks.”

  On the way, they stop for a moment; Larken hears Mirabella speak quietly to one of the flight attendants, requesting that she check the passenger manifest for medical personnel.

  “Just hang on, okay?” Mirabella murmurs. “Try to slow your breathing.”

  After Larken is guided into a seat, someone presses a damp paper towel to her forehead.

  They’re still racing around in there. Larken pictures her thoracic cavity as one gigantic McDonald’s Play Place for gerbils, her heart one of those wire mesh exercisers she’s seen in pet stores, her spine and ribs gerbil monkey bars, her diaphragm a gerbil trampoline, her lungs two big inflatable rooms filled with thousands and thousands of balls that the gerbils jump into, over and over again, wade around in, throw at each other, don’t these little fuckers ever sleep?

  “Larken? Larken,” Mirabella’s voice is saying, “the doctor is here.”

  Physician physician physician, Larken thinks. Christ, can’t you people ever get it right? and then there’s murmuring, Larken has trouble focusing on it but when asked pointedly if she is giving her permission to be treated, she nods and says as clearly as possible, “Yes.”

  “I’m going to administer some intravenous Ativan,” a woman’s voice says. “You’re going to feel a little sting.”

  Time passes. How much?

  “Is that it?” Larken manages to say. She didn’t feel a thing.

  She hears people engaged in quiet conversation overhead, a discussion she comes to realize of procedural and medicinal protocols related to a person with severe flight phobia, and whether or not she should be allowed to remain on an overseas flight. The consensus seems to be that she’s too ill.

  The sound of a door banging open directs her attention to Misty Ariel Kroger, emerging from one of the bathroom cubicles.

  “Is everything all right?” Misty asks. Even pharmaceutically altered, Larken has no trouble perceiving the sudden, potent surge in Misty’s color, from wimpy, watered-down putty to a thick impasto of dogshit brown.

  “Everything’s fine, Misty,” Mirabella says. “Would you please let the group know that Professor Jones and I have been detained?”

  “Of course,” Misty says, smiling. She swaggers away.

  More conversation. Being eye-level with a consortium of waists causes Larken to picture talking belly buttons … umbilici? … umbilicuses!—and she starts to laugh.

  But then they start to converge, hemming her in, can’t they give her some room, for chrissakes? They’re a cloud of insects now, invasive, insistent, buzzing in her ears, and she starts flailing her hands, trying to bat them away.

  One of them leans close and whispers, “We’re going to take you off the plane, Larken.” One of those exotic burrowing bugs from Southern Italy. “It’s for the best.”

  Pesky chigger. Larken slaps her.

  Red-haired St. Michael appears (It’s The Last Judgment), disguised as an airport employee. He’s at the helm of a wheelchair, his expression neutral.

  Heaven or hell? Larken wants to ask, but the gerbils have all nestled into her vocal folds and fallen asleep.

  As Larken is resituated and transported down the aisle in full view of her students and colleague—a large, heavily sedated mammal en route to the meatpacking plant (hell it is, then)—her humiliation is complete.

  The gatekeeper is moving out of position, toward the viewer, into the foreground, into the space that is normally occupied by two kneeling penitents—nun and monk—but is now vacant.

  Where are they? Larken wonders. They’re nowhere else in the painting; they haven’t inserted themselves into Joseph’s carpentry shop or crashed the Annunciation party in the Virgin’s living room. They’re not far away, she senses, just out of sight. Maybe they’ve walked deeper into the painting, through the narrow, open door where the gatekeeper usually keeps watch. Maybe they’ve finally gotten off their knees—they must be so sore!—and left the walled courtyard, gone into town to do some shoe shopping.

  The gatekeeper arrives in the foreground of the painting. Is he about to step out of it? He holds his straw hat flattened against his torso. For the first time, Larken notices the anatomically suggestive placement of the hat, the way a tiny protrusion at the very center of its crown resembles the outpushing belly button of a pregnant woman.

  He looks at her for a moment, wearing the same mournful, distracted expression that has been on his face since circa 1420–1430. Is he going to leave? she wonders again, feeling anxious.

  But no. There must still be a barrier between his world and hers that denies him access. He turns away and starts to climb the steps, as if he intends to pass right out of the frame, from the left side of the triptych into the midsection.

  He continues to ascend the stairs, stairs that she’s never seen before, that she never even knew were in the painting, not even after all the years she’s spent studying it. How is that possible? Maybe they’re hidden between the panels. Maybe there’s a secret door linking the panels that has gone undiscovered! What a find that would be.

  And then Larken is the gatekeeper. She’s going up and up and up on wrought-iron stairs with no visible means of support. They seem to go on forever, straight up at first, and then spiraling, getting narrower and narrower the farther she climbs.

  Finally she’s at the top. There’s a door here, a heavy wood door with metal hinges and a lock. She has keys in her hand. She starts trying the keys, one after another; there are so many of them. They are skeleton keys and none of them fit, and then she realizes how high up she is and she starts to feel afraid. A plane flies by, dangerously close, close enough for Larken to see the faces of her mother and her father and herself in the windows, and then one of the plane’s wings clips her staircase, dislodging it from whatever structural support has been keeping it in place, and then she is falling, falling, trying to scream.

  She wakes up, her heart beating erratically, her breath coming in panicky gasps.

  Is it morning? Did she really sleep an entire day?

  Yes.

  What time is it in England?

  Who gives a shit?

  What time is it here?

  What does it matter? She’s on winter break.

  She starts to cough: a full-fledged, uncontrollable hack, the kind that emanates from deep within the lungs and produces the phlegmy metallic taste that indicates that it’s too late for preventative measures.

  She’s on winter break and she’s sick as a dog.

  Overhead, someone else is coughing with the same lung-searing vehemence. Perhaps
she’s not home at all, but in the terminal tubercular ward of Lincoln General. Perhaps she’s still dreaming.

  Dragging herself to a standing position—the synovial fluid in her joints feels like cement—she shuffles into the bathroom, pees, and then sweeps the contents of her medicine chest into the wastebasket so that she can transport the whole pharmacy back to bed. There must be something here that will help.

  After leaving a message on Gaelan’s answering machine (Didn’t go, I’m here, sick with flu or something, let Viney and Bonnie know, call you later), she collapses back into bed and spends another twenty-four hours in a semicomatose condition, the victim of viral invaders and shame, awakened only occasionally by the sound of her own coughing and the echoing response of her unidentified, consumptive sanitarium-mate upstairs.

  “They’re gone,” Jon croaks.

  “What do you mean, they’re gone?” Larken croaks back. “You shouldn’t be alone. Someone should be taking care of you.” The feeling in her lungs is still dark, boggy, and dangerously virulent, but at least she’s managing bouts of semiconsciousness, vertical orientation, and an ability to speak.

  “I mean, they’ve left.” Jon, too, has been laid low with some sort of bronchial catastrophe; they’re talking on the phone because neither of them feels strong enough to make the trek up or down the stairs. “Mia’s left.” He erupts in a fresh round of coughing.

  “What?”

  “Me,” he manages, eventually. “She’s left me.”

  “Jon. What are you saying?”

  He emits a horrifically phlegmy, emphatic hurk and then announces, “She’s taken Esmé and left me for another woman.”

  “Oh, no. No.”

  “Things were actually going cock-up before Christmas,” Jon continues. “I wanted to tell you, but I also didn’t want to spoil your holiday or make you worry.”

  “Jon …”

  “Oh, fuck all. I was in denial.”

  “I’m coming up …”

  “Are you sure? Can you?”