After the Plague (29 page)

“I'm sorry, Mr. Lercher,” the man behind the desk was saying, “But federal regulations require—”

“Ler
share,
you idiot, Ler
share
—didn't you ever take French? And fuck the regulations. I've already been held up for two and a half hours and damn near killed when the goddamn engine caught fire, and you're trying to tell me I can't take my bag on the airplane, for Christ's sake?”

The other passengers hung their heads, consulted their watches, worked their jaws frantically over thin bands of flavorless gum, the people-movers moved people, the loudspeakers crackled, and the same inane voices repeated endlessly the same inane announcements in English and in Spanish. Ellen felt faint. Or no, she felt nauseated. It was as if there were something crawling up her throat and trying to get out, and all she could think of was the tarantula creeping through the clear plastic tubes of the terrarium in the classroom she'd left behind for good.

Waldo, the kids had called it, after the
Where's Waldo?
puzzles that had swept the fifth graders into a kind of frenzy for a month or two until something else—some computer game she couldn't remember the name of—had superseded them. She'd never liked the big, lazy spider, the slow, stalwart creep of its legs and abdomen as it patrolled its realm, seeking out the crickets it fed on, the alien look of it, like a severed hand moving all on its own. It's harmless, the assistant principal had assured her, but when Tommy Ayala sneaked a big dun trap-door spider into school and dropped it into the terrarium, Waldo had reacted with a swift and deadly ferocity. A lesson had come of that—about animal behavior and territoriality, and nearly every child had a story of cannibalistic guppies or killer hamsters to share—but it wasn't a happy lesson. Lucy Fadel brought up road rage, and Jasmyn Dickers knew a teenager who was stabbed in the neck because he had to live in a converted garage with twelve other people, and somebody else had been bitten by a pit bull, and on and on and on. Fifth graders. Ten years of fifth graders.

“Chicago passengers only,” a flight attendant was saying, and the line melted away as Ellen found herself in yet another steel tube, her heart racing still over the image of that flaming engine and the fatal certainty that had gripped her like the death of everything.
Was it an omen? Was she crazy to get on this flight? And what of the prayer she'd murmured—where had that come from?
Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Prayers were for children, and for the old and hopeless, and she'd grown up to discover that they were addressed not to some wise and recumbent God on high but to the cold gaps between the stars.
Pray for us, now and at the hour of our
—

Up ahead, she saw the open door of the plane, rivets, the thin steel sheet of its skin, flight attendants in their blue uniforms and arrested smiles, and then she was shuffling down the awkward aisle like a mismatched bride—“The overhead bins are for secondary storage only… . A very full flight … Your cooperation, please”—and she was murmuring another sort of prayer now, a more common and profane one:
Christ, don't let me sit next to that idiot again.

She glanced down at her boarding pass—18B—and counted off the rows, so tired, suddenly, that she felt as if she had been drained of blood. (“Anemic,” the doctor had said, clucking her tongue, that was the problem, that and depression.) The line had come to a halt, Ellen's fellow passengers slumped under the weight of their bags like penitents, and all she could see down the length of the aisle was their shoulders, their collars, and the hair that sprouted from their heads in all its multiethnic variety. The lucky ones—the ones already settled in their seats—gazed up at her with irritation, as if she were responsible for the delays, as if she had personally spun out the weather system over the Midwest, put the lies in the pilots' mouths, and flouted the regulations for carry-ons. “All right, all right, give me a minute, will you?” a voice raged out, and through a gap in the line she saw him, six or seven rows down, blocking the aisle as he fought to stuff his bag into the overhead compartment. Force, that was all he could think to use, because he was spoiled, bullying, petulant, like an overgrown fifth grader. She hated him. Everyone on the plane hated him.

And then the flight attendant was there, assuring him that she would find a place for his bag up front, even as an amplified voice hectored them to take their seats and the engines rumbled to life.
Ellen caught a glimpse of his face, blunt and oblivious, as he swung ponderously into his seat, and then the line shuffled forward and she saw that her prayer had been answered—she was three rows ahead of him. She'd been assigned a middle seat, of course, as had most of the passengers bumped from the previous flight, but at least it wasn't a middle seat beside him. She waited as the woman in the aisle seat (mid-fifties, with a saddlebag face and a processed pouf of copper hair) unfastened her seat belt and laboriously rose to make way for her. There was no one in the window seat—not yet, at least—and even as she settled in, elbow to elbow with the saddlebag woman, Ellen was already coveting it.

Could she be so lucky? No, no, she couldn't, and here was another layer of superstition rising up out of the murk of her subconscious, as if luck had anything to do with her or what she'd been through already today or in the past week or month or year—or, for that matter, through the whole course of her vacant and constricted life. A name came to her lips then, a name she'd been trying, with the help of the prescription the doctor had given her, to suppress. She held it there for a moment, enlarged by her grief until she felt like the heroine of some weepy movie, a raped nun, an airman's widow, sloe-eyed and wilting under the steady gaze of the camera. She shouldn't have had the beer, she told herself. Or the Scotch, either. Not with the pills.

The plane quieted. The aisles cleared. She fought down her exhaustion and kept her eyes fixed on the far end of the aisle, where the last passenger—a boy in a reversed baseball cap—was fumbling into his seat. Surreptitiously, with her feet only, she shifted her bag from the space under her seat to the space beneath the window seat, and then, after a moment, she unfastened her seat belt and slipped into the unoccupied seat. She stretched her legs, adjusted her pillow and blanket, watched the flight attendants work their way up the aisle, easing shut the overhead bins. She was thinking that she should have called her mother with the new flight information—she'd call her from Chicago, that's what she'd do—when there was movement at the front of the plane and one final passenger came through the door, even as the attendants
stood by to screw it shut. Stooping to avoid the TV monitors, he came slowly down the aisle, sweeping his eyes right and left to check the row numbers, an overcoat over one arm, a soft computer bag slung over the opposite shoulder. He was dressed in a sport coat and a T-shirt, his hair cut close, after the fashion of the day, and his face seemed composed despite what must have been a mad dash through the airport. But what mattered most about him was that he seemed to be coming straight to her, to 18A, the seat she'd appropriated. And what went through her mind? A curse, that was all. Just a curse.

Sure enough, he paused at Row 18, glanced at the saddlebag woman, and then at Ellen, and said, “Excuse me, I believe I'm in here?”

Ellen reddened. “I thought …”

“No, no,” he said, holding Ellen's eyes even as the saddlebag woman rolled up and out of her seat like a rock dislodged from a crevice, “stay there. It's okay. Really.”

The pilot said something then, a garble of the usual words, the fuselage shuddered, and the plane backed away from the gate with a sudden jolt. Ellen put her head back and closed her eyes.

She woke when the drinks cart came around. There was a sour taste in her mouth, her head was throbbing, and the armrest gouged at her ribs as if it had come alive. She'd been dreaming about Roy, the man who had dismembered her life like a boy pulling the legs off an insect, Roy and that elaborate, humiliating scene in the teachers' lounge, her mother there somehow to witness it, and then she and Roy were in bed, the stiff insistence of his erection (which turned out to be the armrest), and his hand creeping across her rib cage until it was Waldo, Waldo the tarantula, closing in on her breast. “Something to drink?” the broad-faced flight attendant was asking, and both Ellen's seatmates seemed to be hanging on her answer. “Scotch-and-soda,” she said, without giving it a second thought.

The man beside her, the new man, the one who had offered up
his seat to her, was working on his laptop, the gentle blue glow of the screen softly illuminating his lips and eyes. He looked up at the flight attendant, his fingers still poised over the keys, and murmured, “May I have a chardonnay, please?” Then it was the saddlebag woman's turn. “Sprite,” she said, the dull thump of her voice swallowed up in the drone of the engines.

The man flattened himself against the seat back as the flight attendant leaned in to pass Ellen her drink, then he typed something hurriedly, shut down the computer, and slipped it into his lap, beneath the tray table. He took the truncated bottle, the glass, napkin and peanuts from the attendant, arranged them neatly before him, and turned to Ellen with a smile. “I never know where to put my elbows on these things,” he said, shrinking away from the armrest they shared. “It's kind of like being in a coffin—or one of those medieval torture devices, you know what I mean?”

Ellen took a sip of her drink and felt the hot smoke of the liquor in the back of her throat. He was good-looking, handsome—more than handsome. At that moment, the engines thrumming, the flat, dull earth fanning out beneath the plane, he was shining and beautiful, as radiant as an archangel come flapping through the window to roost beside her. Not that it would matter to her. Roy was handsome too, but she was done with handsome, done with fifth graders, done with the whole failed experiment of living on her own in the big, smoggy, palm-shrouded city. Turn the page, new chapter. “Or maybe a barrel,” she heard herself say, “going over Niagara Falls.”

“Yeah,” he said, laughing through his nose. “Only in the barrel you don't get your own personal flotation device.”

Ellen didn't know what to say to that. She took another pull at her drink for lack of anything better to do. She was feeling it, no doubt about it, but what difference would it make if she were drunk or sober as she wandered the labyrinthine corridors of O'Hare, endlessly delayed by snow, mechanical failure, the hordes of everybody going everywhere? Three sheets to the wind, right—isn't that what they said? And what, exactly, did that mean? Some
old sailing expression, she supposed, something from the days of the clipper ships, when you vomited yourself from one place to another.

Their meals had come. The broad-faced flight attendant was again leaning in confidentially, this time with the eternal question—“Chicken or pasta?”—on her lips. Ellen wasn't hungry—food was the last thing she wanted—but on an impulse she turned to her neighbor. “I'm not really very hungry,” she said, her face too close to his, their elbows touching, his left knee rising up out of the floor like a stanchion, “but if I get a meal, would you want it—or some of it? As an extra, I mean?”

He gave her a curious look, then said, “Sure, why not?” The flight attendant was waiting, the sealed-in smile beginning to crack at the corners with the first fidgeting of impatience. “Chicken for me,” the man said, “and pasta for the lady.” And then, to Ellen, as he shifted the tray from one hand to the other: “You sure, now? I know it's not exactly three-star cuisine, but you've got to eat, and the whole reason they feed you is to make the time pass so you don't realize how cramped and miserable you are.”

The smell of the food—salt, sugar, and animal fat made palpable—rose to her nostrils, and she felt nauseated again. Was it the pills? The alcohol? Or was it Roy—Roy, and life itself? She thought about that, and the instant she did, there he was—Roy—clawing his way back into her mind. She could see him now, his shoulders squared in his black polyester suit with the little red flecks in it—the suit she'd helped him pick out, as if he had any taste or style he could call his own—his eyes swollen out of their sockets, his lips reduced to two thin, ungenerous flaps of skin grafted to his mouth.
Shit-for-brains.
That's what he'd called her, right there in the teachers' lounge with everybody watching—Lynn Bendall and Lauren McGimpsey and that little teacher's aide, what was her name? He was shouting, and she was shouting back, no holds barred, not anymore.
So what if I am sleeping with her? What's it to you? You think you own me? Do you? Huh, shit-for-brains? Huh?
Lauren's face was dead, but Ellen saw Lynn exchange a smirk with the little teacher's aide, and that smirk said it all, because
Lynn, it seemed, knew more about who he was sleeping with than Ellen did herself.

The man beside her—her neighbor—was eating now. He was hungry, and that was good. She felt saintly, watching him eat and listening to him chatter on about his work—he was some sort of writer or journalist, on his way to Philadelphia for the holidays. She'd renounced the pasta and given it to him, and he was grateful—he hadn't eaten all day, and he was a growing boy, he said, with a smile, though he must have been in his early thirties. And unmarried, judging from his naked fingers. When the drinks cart came by, Ellen ordered another Scotch.

They were talking about movies, maybe the only subject people had in common these days, when Ellen glanced up to see Lercher, his face twisted in a drunken scowl, looming over them as he made his unsteady way to the forward lavatories. She and her companion—his name was Michael, just Michael, that was all he offered—had struck a real chord when it came to the current cinema (no movies with explosions, no alien life-forms, no geriatric lovers, no sappy kids), and she'd begun to feel something working inside her. She was interested, genuinely interested in something, for maybe the first time in months. Michael. She held the name on her tongue like the thinnest wafer, repeating it silently, over and over. And then it came to her: he was the anti-Roy, that's who he was, so polite and unassuming, a soul mate, somebody who could care, really care—she was sure of it.