by Greg Baxter
My father is dressed in a flannel blue plaid shirt with various shades of brown in it, and a white undershirt that is tight around his neck. The flannel shirt is tucked into a pair of blue jeans hiked up very high, and he’s got on a very flash pair of fluorescent yellow running shoes. This is his travel gear. He likes to be comfortable when he travels—he also has the sound-canceling headphones and a neck pillow. In Berlin, however, and even during much of our trip to the Rhine, to the Ardennes, to Luxembourg, and to Brussels, he wore old suits, the suits he wore as a professor—suits that are now oversized on him. I don’t know what my father looks like when, back at home, he’s out and about. If I call him and he is not at home watching golf, he is usually down some megastore aisle of tools or groceries stacked thirty feet high on either side of him, looking for screws, or comparing prices of pasta, or considering a new weedeater that he will use once, maybe twice, then give to the gardener. Other than these places, I don’t think he goes anywhere. I don’t think he goes to the movies, I don’t think he goes for walks, I don’t think he drives to the coast—the Gulf—as he used to do, when we were young and he was home from teaching. So far as I know, he has no friends. We talk about once a month. When I catch him at home, we hang up the phone and go on our laptops, so we can see each other, and usually he’s in a white sleeveless muscle shirt, though his arms are just his bones, and he’s unshaven. About twenty minutes into any conversation, he says, I’m about to faint, gotta go. Sometimes, if it’s hot, he doesn’t wear a shirt at all. His skin is pretty loose, and you can see his ribs.
Trish and I stand at the same time. We leave my father alone at the table. He slumps in his chair. He seems instantly asleep. Just looking at him, I yawn. I hope this works, says Trish. Me too, I say. We go down the escalator, through the wide and weightless slow space of the terminal. I cannot think of anything to say. Trish and my father have spent a lot of time alone, but Trish and I have never been alone, or only so rarely and briefly that it doesn’t really count. I decide not to say anything. This is a solemn occasion, after all, and speaking isn’t necessary. Trish’s phone beeps. Throughout our hour together in the food hall, her phone has beeped several times. It’s her personal phone—she also has a clunky old Nokia for work. I know, from my father, that she and her husband are going through a difficult period. I don’t know Trish well enough to ask about it, or even to offer sympathy. But my father told me it seems destined to end, and it would not surprise me if it has just ended. She reads her phone. When she’s done, she looks up at me and I realize I’m staring at her. She gives me a funny smile. Sorry, I say, I was just lost in thought there.
How long will you stay at home? she asks.
For me, by now, home is London, I say.
Of course, she says—when will you go back?
Soon, I say. I can’t afford to stay away much longer. I’m supposed to be starting something new.
Surely they’ll wait, under the circumstances.
Maybe, but not too much longer.
What do you do?
I’m a marketing consultant.
I know, I was just wondering what you did as a marketing consultant.
I devise marketing strategies for clients.
She gives me a look that says, I know that, I meant what kind of strategies do you devise. But instead of pressing any further, she says, Your dad says you’re quite successful.
Does he?
She nods.
I say nothing. It doesn’t sound like something my father would say. For a moment I’m not sure I ought to believe her—maybe she’s trying to mend a rift she’s perceived between my father and me, a rift for which she may feel some responsibility. But she isn’t responsible. And I am not really successful—by which I mean not as successful as I once believed I should be. I did International Business in college—at Princeton, which was where my father went—and I did all right. I decided not to do an MBA. I wanted to work. I didn’t want to waste any time. But I also wanted to travel. I passed up some good job offers in the States. An internship in London came up—unpaid—and I took it. I never planned to stay a long time in London, but over the years I became increasingly convinced that I could not return home, that I could not leave London and somehow find contentment in a place like Tampa or Dallas. I’d grown accustomed to, and much preferred, the way people lived on top of one another in London. And I suppose I very much liked the fact that I was a boy from a place where we all drove big trucks on big roads and where space and solitude were easily attainable, and now I was living in a place where nobody I knew had a car and where space and solitude were not features of the landscape but conditions one had to manufacture in the mind. There was, yes, always New York, but I had been to New York several times while at college. There was something in the distance of London, something about a body of water between me and where I came from, and something in particular about being a foreigner. I have a nice, if very small, flat in Spitalfields, which I sublet from an architect. I run my own one-man consultancy now, and I keep busy. I’ve just left a client I’d been with for many years—a supermarket chain. It was a nice situation. I worked three days a week at the client’s main London office. I had a badge. The other two days of the week, I worked for other clients. Just before the news of Miriam’s death, however, I left the supermarket chain. I found something new—not necessarily better, but different.
We’re here, I say.
The door to the lounge is translucent. There isn’t a handle. Trish puts her palm flatly on the glass and pushes. The door opens and we are met, unexpectedly, by another corridor, which is narrow, and which leads to another door, also of translucent glass. It is like an airlock, in which the wealthy or well traveled can spend a moment decontaminating their thoughts, preparing themselves to switch from chaos to luxury. Behind that door, the coffee-brown lounge is making noise. It seems like such a faraway place, something like—at least from our side of the door—a memory. We approach, open the door, enter, and a woman meets us. She is handsome, tanned, and she wears a gray suit, not a uniform but a suit. Past her, there are large leather chairs and recliners. Most are occupied by businessmen—some look European, they wear nice suits with slim legs, and some are American, they wear slacks and button-down shirts, they have gadgets attached to their belts—but there are families there as well, families traveling business class, kids playing with tablet computers or listening to music with headphones. It is quiet. It is a perfect place to snooze. The seats are deep and obviously soft. It’s very full, Trish tells the woman. The woman says, with an English accent, even though she is clearly German, Normally it’s less crowded. Everyone looks satisfied—what better way to take advantage of executive lounge privileges than to use it on a day when all the flights are delayed. Everyone looks at home here. The only thing that seems to have disturbed the equilibrium is our presence. Some of them are waiting to see if we’ll be allowed to enter. Beyond the leather chairs and coffee tables is a dark bar with bottles glowing blue and gold and green on glass shelves, and there are huge red lampshades that hang from the ceiling. The lampshades, which are wide and round, remind me of a place, but I cannot remember where. The woman in the gray suit asks us for our boarding cards or our membership cards. I think of how I might begin to propose what we’re proposing. I had a script in my head a few moments ago, but now that I see the lounge, now that I am standing in it, I realize that script has no value. What is to stop hundreds of people—economy passengers like us—from coming here, complaining of extreme fatigue, and begging for a seat to sleep on? If extreme fatigue were all one needed to get a seat in the executive lounge, everybody would be here. I can’t speak. I’m overwhelmed, I suppose, by how obvious it is that we are not going to get my father a place to sleep, or by my embarrassment for having had the naivety to believe it was possible. I should return to him immediately—go get his headache pills and admit that this was a foolish attempt. But I don’t move. I look up and remember why it is that those lampshades, which hang ve
ry low, seem so familiar. Then Trish begins to speak. I don’t really listen to her, because I know it is pointless. The lampshades remind me of a lodge in Scotland, a little mansion on a lake in the Highlands. It was where my mother and father honeymooned, where they visited a few times thereafter, and it was where, after my mother’s death, my father visited twice. The lampshades here remind me of the lampshades in the lodge restaurant. The restaurant has great big booth tables in the center of the dining room, all situated so that they face the lake, more or less, and all underneath a large red lampshade, which dimly illuminates the tabletop. It calls to mind Mafia or Rat Pack dinners in Vegas. My father always reserved the same booth. He and my mother sat there. He and my wife and I sat there once. Then he and I sat there, on our own, another time. I went there, not too long ago, by myself, but the booths were booked out. Miriam never came. She was invited, and my father and I both offered to pay for her, or help her afford the trip, but she always said money wasn’t the problem—she was too busy. I know my father offered Miriam money a few times, but I don’t think she ever took it. My father and Miriam didn’t speak often, and he never saw her after she left home, twenty years ago. The time that had passed was how I argued to Trish, and to myself, against allowing my father to see or identify Miriam’s body. He would not have known what he was looking at.
Trish says, I understand, of course. She’s speaking to the woman in the gray suit. She turns to me and says, Let’s try something else. I thank the woman for her time, even though I’ve missed the exchange. She tells me she’s sorry they cannot accommodate my father. I hang on to the end of her sentence for a moment, because I am certain she’s going to add something—an alternative solution. But she doesn’t. She just smiles. I’m leaning a little forward now, so I straighten up. Of course, I say, it’s no problem.
We decide to get my father’s painkillers next. Trish rubs her temples and casually says that she needs something for a headache, too. I’ve been so fixated on my own lack of sleep that I’ve failed to notice hers. But she doesn’t complain, or at least she doesn’t complain to me. I still find it quite strange to look at Trish and think of her in the army, in places where real conflict was ongoing. I haven’t asked her about it. I wouldn’t know what to ask. I’ve always had a low opinion of people in the military. I’ve always had a low opinion of patriotism. My father finds Trish’s background fascinating. I’m more interested in her work for the State Department. For the rest of her life, every four or five years she’ll move to a new city. She’ll learn a few more languages. She’ll meet people from all over. She doesn’t know where she’ll go next. After Berlin, she’ll go back to the States, probably for a year, then get posted somewhere else. It sounds like the perfect life, I said to her during our first week in Berlin, and it even felt true to say. If it suits you, it suits you, she said.
Trish points to a drugstore ahead of us. It’s crowded. Like every shop, and every square inch of the terminal, it’s crowded. Though it is a sick time of year, and there are many people who badly need cough syrup, cold and flu relief, or something to stop runny noses, the drugstore—I no longer call them drugstores, but Trish and my father call them drugstores—is mostly full of people who do not actually intend to buy anything. It reminds me of the way tourists walk through chapels and churches—they process very slowly, head vaguely for the altar, then circle back out, pretending to feel neither underwhelmed nor foolish. I can’t really tell where the line begins. I just squirm through some people, then stand around and try to make eye contact with one of the people at the cash registers, which is, I’ve learned, how Germans queue. When I finally get eye contact, I tell the woman, in my rudimentary German, that I am looking for acetaminophen. She warns me that acetaminophen is actually a toxic substance that causes organ damage, and an overdose can lead to death. Trish, who is staring at her phone as we wait, briefly looks up to check that she heard the woman correctly. Ask for ibuprofen, she says. Do you have ibuprofen? I ask. She says she has ibuprofen. The woman is wearing a white lab coat and is very suntanned and wears tortoiseshell glasses that make her seem kinder than she actually is. Ibuprofen can change the structure of your kidneys, she says, after three or four years of continual use. Then she says, Your condition will improve tomorrow anyway, without medicine, but you can never repair the damage you might do to an organ. I look at Trish. I don’t really understand what is happening, or what I should do next. Trish says, Germans don’t take medication, they just suffer. I tell the woman I want the ibuprofen. I ask Trish if she wants her own box or if she just wants to have some of ours. She says she’ll just take one from ours.
I’m going to take four of these pills when we board, I say, and get some sleep. I’d like to sit down, fasten my seat belt, close my eyes as we taxi away from the gate, and wake as the wheels hit the runway in Atlanta.
When was the last time you were in the States? asks Trish.
About a year after my dad’s retirement, about six years ago.
And that was the last time you saw him?
That’s right, but before that I saw him much more often.
There are, here and there, gray doors in the tall gray walls—we pass half a dozen as we make our way back to the food court. The doors are almost invisible in the walls, and beside each is a keypad for airport personnel. The doors are numbered but otherwise unmarked. Trish says, I bet they have a break room somewhere, or a first-aid room, I bet they have a room with a cot or a couch in it.
The first man she flags down tells us to try the Airport Clinic, which is an actual hospital attached to the airport, but my father isn’t sick, he’s tired. And it’s a very long way, a different terminal. The next person we find, a woman, gives us no help at all. This is impossible, utterly impossible, it’s preposterous and self-evidently illogical—that’s the gist of her response. Trish storms back to security, pulls out her diplomatic passport and protocol ID, and declares that she is a US consular officer and she’s in need of assistance. We are taken to a small white room. It’s a room that seems designed to make people feel uneasy, and the moment I step inside I feel guilty of something. I start to sweat and feel nauseous—now the hunger is coming, and the fatigue. It is an office with no windows, no telephone, no clutter, nothing on the walls, just a desk and some chairs. There are three doors in and out of it. There is the door we have entered, and two others, one on the right wall and one on the left, and when a woman finally does appear, she treats our sorrows with an equanimity that suggests she could, at any moment, walk out either of those doors without an explanation. She carries nothing with her. She looks at us like a doctor might look at two hypochondriacs. She sits down opposite us and asks for our flight details. She speaks to us in English. Trish refuses to use English. I hand over our boarding cards. She asks for my father’s passport, and Trish says, This is unnecessary, this is utterly unnecessary. I say, I don’t have my father’s passport. The woman looks up very slowly from our boarding cards, as if to say, What can I possibly do for you if you do not have your father’s passport?
Do you know why we are here? Trish asks.
The woman does not answer that question, either. Instead she says that she is here to take our information. And that is when I realize—and Trish must realize it at the same moment, because she puts her head very softly in her hands—that this is a room where requests are slowly, agonizingly declined, that nothing is possible in this room. Let’s go, says Trish. I ask for the boarding cards. The woman doesn’t want to give them back, and for a tenth of a second I consider the possibility that we have actually gotten ourselves detained, which is of course absurd, but it is how the room makes you feel. The woman hands the boarding cards back. She smiles as though she has done us a favor, and then disappears out one of the side doors—not the one she used to enter. This makes me think that she is moving through a row of rooms, and meeting people like us, people with hysterical requests, rejecting them one after the other. When we leave the room, I ask, When did you learn German?
When I arrived two years ago, she says. Do you take lessons? I ask. I take lessons in Arabic and Chinese, she says, twice a week in each. But you’re done studying German, I say. I speak German, she says.
We return to my father. He is upright in his chair with his eyes open, but his gaze is absent and he seems unconscious. For a moment I think that I will have to shake him, and then I think that he is possibly dead. I am inclined to try to lift his hands and see if they drop. I am inclined to shout, Wake up! Instead, I stand and wait, and I observe him. If he really is dead, I think—and then a sharp and undesirable thrill bolts through me—I shall have to bury them both, he and Miriam, and I must permanently move into his house. I will get to wear his skin, inherit the pace of his life. I see myself—I am a little bit older and a little bit fatter—in my father’s pool, my skin is bright red, I am drunk. I float in a pool chair with cup holders. From time to time, I splash water on myself to cool down. I take long floating naps. In the background, the television plays golf or financial news shows. Nobody is there but me, except for the pool guy on Mondays and the gardener on Tuesdays and the maid on Fridays. I refuse to answer the phone. Every once in a while I get in the truck and head to the hardware store, or the gardening supercenter, or shop for groceries at the slowest pace imaginable, using coupons. Then my father blinks, consciousness strikes like a bell in his head, and he turns to us and says, Any luck? Trish says, None, I’m really sorry.
We tried everything, I say, apart from admitting you to the hospital.
My father says, You know, I feel quite a bit better. I feel like I’ve slept. How long were you gone?
I say, It’s been about half an hour, at least.