by Pasha Malla
The girl looked out the window of the airplane at the country passing by far below, the dun-coloured plains ceding to frost-bitten tundra and thick drapings of snow. The sky darkened. She felt she was traveling not through just space but time, backward from the daylight into the waiting, boundless night. Soon there was nothing to look at but the blinking tip of the airplane’s wing, and the girl slid the blind down and sank into her chair and tried to summon the boy’s face to mind—and failed.
Travelling west the boy too struggled to picture what the girl looked like. In his mind’s eye he saw a nose, a mouth, the moistness of her eyes, but could not assemble these pieces into a whole. Instead she existed as fragments, glimpses, sensations. But soon, he thought—in only hours—she would be standing in front of him, and he would see her face, and touch her face, and, he presumed, also finally kiss her face.
And the boy and the girl cozied down into their seats while the jet engines droned and thought about that night, which seemed so long ago, when they’d curled up together in the girl’s tent, noses almost touching. They closed their eyes and heard in their minds each other’s voices—the boy’s wild, hooting laugh, the girl’s plaintive chuckle—but still couldn’t picture each other, not quite.
The girl dozed and dreamed of arriving in the little northern airport, waiting for the boy, anxious to meet his eyes, feel his embrace. Instead someone she didn’t know approached, extending a hand to shake. Only when she took this person’s hand did she realize it was him—yet his touch felt like nothing, and everything collapsed: they were strangers, two lonely people who’d met for an instant in a remote and alienating place, who’d communed in their loneliness and released each other back into the world. The girl woke with a snap: a flight attendant was offering drinks.
Meanwhile the boy tried to imagine kissing the girl, and it was like kissing a phantom; even the idea of her seemed to squirm away. He recalled that the only time either of them had mentioned sex it had been him joking that they hadn’t had it. Something about the word, uttered between them, had seemed awkward, even polluted. So instead they’d dealt entirely in dreamy sentiment. Their relationship seemed weightless, such a fairy tale, to him now. What would they do with each other’s bodies, when all they shared was a fantasy? The empty night slid past out the plane’s window. The boy looked into it. His own reflection, suspended amid the blackness, stared back.
~
The boy’s flight landed first.
He and the other passengers waited in the terminal for their bags. Instead of a luggage carousel, suitcases were nudged through a flap from the tarmac. He remembered all this from the summer, yet everything now seemed performed, as though according to a script. Shouldering his backpack, he slid into a chair in the departures lounge for lack of anywhere else to sit.
The girl’s flight would be arriving within the hour. Though it was mid-afternoon, outside the airport darkness hung in sheets. There were no stars or moon. The other arrivals on the boy’s flight collected their bags and disappeared, and those heading to points south boarded the next departing flight. A plane rose blinking and billowing steam into the sky; it seemed to do so with great effort, as though roused from sleep.
While the boy waited for her the girl listened to the pilot announce their imminent landing; the temperature at ground-level was minus twenty-three. She looked out the window and saw a haze over the hills that might have been the lights of the town. But it was hard to say. She’d never before seen anywhere smothered in such pitch.
As the plane began its descent her guts did a little tumble. Again she tried to picture the boy and could conjure only an anonymous figure huddled inside a parka, breath puffing from its faceless face. She felt her body angling down, toward this person—drawn to him, she thought—and wondered if, once they were in each other’s arms, everything might come rushing back. But it was a fantasy tinged with doubt and dread.
In the departures lounge, the boy watched the plane touch down and run screaming to the end of the runway. Each second felt excruciating: the girl was on that flight! He strained to locate her face in one of the illuminated cabin windows. But the people were only silhouettes. From the far side of the plane the girl gazed out over dark, empty fields beyond the airport, longing for the view to swing to the terminal. Yet she wished, also, that the plane might taxi back along the runway and lift mercifully skyward.
The plane pulled up to the gate. A set of stairs was rolled up and the passengers were unloaded and herded inside the terminal, the automatic doors marked arrivals wheezing open and shut, open and shut. Locals appeared to collect loved ones and associates: a woman fell into a man’s arms; another man was mobbed joyously by two children, one clutching each leg; one coterie of business-types was greeted by another with handshakes and curtly bowed heads. Still more people filed into the terminal. The boy’s hands trembled and a slight acidic feeling burned in the back of his throat.
The girl was last off the plane. She stepped onto the runway and gazed around: the world seemed lightless, with the airport blazing amid it like a signal fire. Toward it she followed a large man rolling a suitcase on a leather strap. She couldn’t see around him, and she was content not to. In fact, she cowered behind this man and his luggage, while anxiety seethed and scraped in her chest.
Here were the last of the passengers. The boy tried to calm himself with memories of that night they’d spent together, and the girl too thought, as the man and his suitcase pushed through the door, about how outside her own body she’d felt all summer, and that final night, warmed in someone else’s arms, that she’d been made whole again.
The doors opened.
The man rolled straight through the terminal, all the way to the exit. In the parking lot a waiting taxi swept him off into town.
For a moment, the doors hung open.
A chilly draft came winnowing in from outside.
The doors closed.
Lit from within, the windows reflected the lounge back onto itself.
It was empty. There was no one there.
And though not a soul appeared in view, and the lounge showed no signs of life save the slight buzzing of the fluorescents above, for an instant you would have sworn that something happened out there among the chairs: a ghostly shift in the air, like two breezes colliding, with a shudder, and a sigh, and a slight strange bend of the light.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Author photograph by Michael Edwards
PASHA MALLA’s first collection of short stories, The Withdrawal Method, a Globe and Mail and National Post book of the year, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Trillum Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize (Best First Book, Canada & Caribbean) and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. A frequent contributor to The Walrus, the Globe and Mail and CBC radio, he is also the winner of an Arthur Ellis Award for crime fiction, two National Magazine Awards for humour writing, and has twice had stories included in the Journey Prize anthology. People Park, Malla's debut novel, was selected as a 2012 Amazon.ca Best Books Editor's Pick and shortlisted for the 2012 Amazon.ca First Novel Award.
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Kare
n Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”
Copyright © 2013 Pasha Malla
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This edition published in 2013 by
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ISBN 978-1-77089-429-7
Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk
E-book design: Erin Mallory
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.