American Spirit: A Novel (31 page)

Matthew thought about the question in a sort of mildly drugged earnestness and decided that no, no that is not, in fact, the spirit. It’s still a jet, you pussies, it’s a miracle, this old bag, it’s nothing near as grim as thirty days at sea or in a wagon train waiting for cholera to stick half of your family in unmarked graves. It’s a less aesthetically pleasing jet, yes. It’s a jet that gives the impression of wanting to slouch its shoulders and succumb to a lazy high-pitched moan and ninety-degree downward plunge to a hard-earned retirement, yes. And sure, fine, the seats will weep stories of all the honeymoon asses that sat in them thirty years ago the minute you sit on them. The worn headrests and permanently oil-blurred and buffed windows will show you the ghosts of nineteen seventies and eighties California families still filled with hope; moms and dads digging a little deeper than they thought they could, in order to pull off a special international family vacation; the station wagon parked back
at long-term at LAX waiting to get dustier than they’d ever seen it; mom and dad in the aisle seats, kids all wide-eyed in the middle and window on mom’s side, their wide eyes glued to the window, looking down to see the dots of severe, untamed Indonesian terra firma in water as blue as it is in every pirate flick they’d ever seen in their suburban Cineplex; their most secret dreams appearing to just maybe come true if they were to believe everything that was unfolding underneath this plane back then.

And yes, there would be melancholy tales in every faded American aviation logo that couldn’t be pried off by the after-market broker that sold this thing into service again, so for every eighties honeymoon the seats wheezed when you sat on them, the mind would sift through divorce statistics and wonder what came of it. None of it is any reason to walk away and book a later flight on a normal plane.

The heart starts to rally for Matthew to long for the wet-leased flight attendant, the head says everything to second the motion from the heart: She’s cute and small, exotic and as doomed as anything under the sun on this side of the equator. She’s all island skin, shoulders rubbed smooth from a thousand days in water and moist sand, she’s one small waist and serious hips that scream,
LIFE
!
FUCK AND CREATE LIFE
!
MAKE THREE LIVES FOR EVERY SINGLE ONE THAT DEATH HAS TAKEN
!
Her eyes smolder and her mouth broods. The head argues that she smolders and broods simply because she’s likely been told this hunk of McDonnell Douglas shit trap is probably going to break into hot, rusty shrapnel after
a week’s worth of ferrying the desperate to low-season paradise. She looks so irresistible, the head posits, simply because she’s struggling with the moral resignation it takes for her to follow the captain’s rules, one of which seems to be: Under no circumstances whatsoever explain what a wet-lease is, no matter how many times the screwed-sideways, disoriented, daydreamy whitey holding his nuts asks. Look at her! That’s the dare from the brain, look at how her heart is hard, her life dire, how she feels used up without ever being touched! All of this is projected, of course. Regardless, the minute the brain lays that last little portrait of engaging in some more emotional bankruptcy, Matthew decides he and the free-agent flight attendant have a lot in common and should talk.

Bad decision, too. Because the things in the blood that have conspired to make this woman look like a beautiful solution are the same things that have conspired to make Matthew look like a skittish middle-management reject drug fiend with a carful of guns, drugs, mildly profane coffee mugs, and discount porno in long-term parking at an airport in post-9/11 New York. He’s covered in a thin film of about thirty-six hours of no air-conditioning, no shower, no real food he’s recognized, and so strung out he can’t take his hands out of his pants for fear of falling apart. But the brain is hardwired to try to get the biological container to create another container just like it before this one expires, so Matthew does his best to look suave, taking one hand out of his pants and pressing the flight attendant call button, which apparently
stopped working right around twenty years ago just after the prime of this plane’s life. Press, no
ding,
press, no
ding,
press, nope, and this goes on for about seven tries and then the brain seems to think that perhaps if it’s PRESSED VERY HARD it will work. And so, really, that was how the button ended up working; not so much by making a sound, but by making the upper three quarters of the body writhe to reach up and depress it time and again, and harder each time while the head stretched skyward, cocked like a dog, trying to hear if the thing was
ding
ing anywhere, or just
click
ing about twenty-three inches above Matthew. But it worked, so in the end, that’s all that matters about the dry-leased flight attendant call button.

Everything’s disconnected on this plane, and it shudders at the oddest moments, it’s quirky and worn like some desperado acid-cult bus, but it’s the kind of quirky and worn that feels like it could go into a hard dive into the water or ground at about four hundred miles an hour at any moment, and for some reason Matthew finds it all quite comforting. The gray tries to recall, the quasi-Wiki way it recalls, how it is that Ritalin is supposed to work. There’s something rattling around about Ritalin basically speeding up the system of a hyper kid until the kid is somehow calmed by the frequency and speed of his biological water-bag-on-bones finally matching the speed and frequency of his nerves and brain and thoughts and everything. And so maybe the plane is working on him in the same fashion, that is to say, maybe finally the stuff outside of Matthew feels like the stuff inside
of Matthew; high speed and ramshackle, miracle and mistake, on lease until it has crashed and gone.

“Hello okay? Yes I can help?”

Oh, right, there’s you; you’re here now. Shit.

“Yes. I mean, right? It seems like you could. Oh!” Matthew’s stammering start isn’t made any smoother by realizing he still has one hand cupping his nuts in anticipation of pain.

“I wasn’t, this isn’t. I was just…”

“Put now on seat belt, sir.”

“Oh, I know. Yeah, no… I know. And do you live in Taipei, or?” Matthew manages, while he puts now on his seat belt, sir.

But in the time it takes to fasten up, she’s smiled kindly and left, back to her jump seat by the haunted and vacant boarded-up galley. Gone, just like that. In fairness, it’s hard to surmise exactly how long fastening the belt took, especially with only one hand out of the pants and a head screwed on sideways more than it usually is. The noodle does dim math in the rich emollients of serotonin and the biological imperative, and decides flirting with the wet-leased flight attendant went well. Matthew, smiling kind of askance and looking like the victim of a discount dentist’s generous prescriptions and gasses, jams his other hand back down the front of his pants, and waits for the improbable safe landing in Bali.

At the airport, the shitty station wagon lands hot and the captain slams on the brakes like a drowsy drunk surprised at how fast the curve in a freeway off-ramp snuck up on
him. Matthew deplanes onto pale, soft, aged tarmac under a white-hot sun trying to X-ray his head, the day here is a laser drilled right at the eyes. The painful nuts, the fine elixirs in cans, the pills in bottles, it all leads to a slow-motion lurch into a blunt, round, ugly squat of a building; a sort of giant, low-slung concrete hat box that feels like an unfinished high school gymnasium turned armory.

If there’s one catch to medical tourism’s significant discount on Extracorporeal Shock Wave Lithotripsy, it may be that one has to stand, hands jammed into crotch, in a humid crush of about one thousand people trying to clear customs with no evident line or system. Kind and tame clock punchers from Phoenix in pastel sport knits; aged and fading bachelor warriors hell-bent on being laid back; middle-class families from Los Angeles with dads looking over a sea of heads damp with sweat, starting to realize the travel piece in the
Times
was a load of horseshit; a decent showing from the newly single thirty- and forty-something women that fall into the suburban-hot file, a contingency that certainly must have spiked recently on account of the book from the community center Put ’n’ Take, which, Matthew surmises, must also be a movie by now, judging by the sheer numbers here. Or maybe the book was a movie first, the wilted brain imagines that this is how it works with books these days—first the movie, then the book, and eventually the idea.

The brain sits up there in its bone-hard sauna and figures that this is the way everything in the world works now, sideways and backward like this. First the movie, then the
book; first the anthemic cultural catchphrase, then the pop song that incorporates it; first the divorce, then the self-improvement, then the marriage; first the mansion in the leafy upper-middle-class slum, then the plan to afford it.

The wait inches from fifteen minutes, to thirty, to forty-five, toward sixty. Matthew hasn’t counted in fifteens since unloading mugs so many weeks ago, feels like years now, before the cabin, before westward expansion to Los Angeles and West Yellowstone, before pain forced any of this Bali shit to happen. There’s no end in sight really to the way the weary crowd packs in and appears to make no progress. Officers of some sort patrol the perimeter. Matthew sees a skinny customs thug pressing by on the outskirts of the tight pack, and wisely takes a hand off the genitals to fold a twenty into a crisp thin triangle, a shock of Jackson’s hair at the top of the pyramid, edges pressed razor thin.

When the man comes by Matthew says, “Excuse me. Hello? Is there a way I can…” And with this he motions forward with his head while handing the twenty over at belt level. The guard smiles and snatches it while maintaining eye contact, the way a crab on rocks doesn’t need to stare at the hunk of dead fish it’s just grabbed, and he walks on. Matthew follows, and the officer twists his whip-thin torso back and makes it clear with a bark that Matthew is to stay right where he is. Fuck Bali already, the head says. The heart, having developed a sensible love of lucre, says yes, fuck Bali indeed with its twenty-dollars-gets-you-nothing policy. A dad behind Matthew confirms that this is the way it works
with these guys, that they smile and take the money like it’s a hello, as if one has just had the brilliant idea to hand it over instead of keeping it for one’s self.

“Yeah, tried that myself.”

“Do they come back with a stamp or anything?”

“If they do, it takes more than a half hour, because that’s when he took my money, smiled, and welcomed me to Bali.”

Matthew and the dad take a moment to stand and confirm that the guard is all smile-and-con, a crooked vending machine sucking up money without surrendering a thing. A salve to at least have company in being taken, it somehow soothes the sting from the greeting. Jesus, no wonder people come to places like this and immediately hit the rum then stroll the streets in white-hot sex-blind boning fury. If one lands on an island and the hustle starts this hard and early, it seems only fair to walk the length of the place doing to the local stock what was done to you before you were fifty yards from the plane. The whole mess passes, the whole damp hothouse horde of second-guessing families; middle-aged, spiritually bankrupt desperadoes; young devil dolls from Los Angeles all gasoline blood, hot-rod giggle, and summer snatch that almost nobody on earth is having until the curtain starts to come down on these girls like it comes down on all of us eventually to level the field and narrow up the options. The whole parade made it through like time-lapse photography, through three narrow gates with glass boxes at the end with parrots like the one trained to snatch the bribe from your hand. The passport gets stamped, the
questions are asked. Why are you here? Vacation. And by vacation Matthew means having around nine thousand tiny sonic thumps aimed at his kidney until the rock shatters and he’s able to piss bloody sand on this seaside heaven then get on a plane bound for American airspace. Straight along, the dull-pain shuffle, lurch, and drag right past the suckers who checked bags. Matthew’s small backpack and carry-on are targets for one last hustle-and-grin shakedown. Two rather official-looking men run up all smiles.

“I carry, we carry, sir.”

“I’m not a woman. Unfortunately.”

“Thank you, yes, we carry, please.”

“Fuck, the…” And this while yanking the fucking thing right back from Nusa, or Naruda, or Akimbo, Gurn Blanston, Mondo Paw, Tak “Jimbo” Fireside, Frond Jewel, or whatever parents named these grifters when they were still angels with dreams.

“Thank you. Please. To carry now for you.”

“Fuck away. You dicking… up the shit?”

The one laugh the heart can count on is when the brain and mouth jumble out a weird little rushed stab at casually assertive profanity like this. Matthew tries to sell it with a look, a look that tries to say,
Yes, that’s right, you heard me, and I mean it, mister: Fuck away, you dicking up the shit.

The cabs outside make up for what one suffers to get to them with prices so low they seem unkind to the man driving. The bags go in, smiles of tragic teeth, fair-price guarantees, and a greeting. A
slam, swack, kerrang,
as the trunk,
one door, then the second close, shut hard in a zip of getting down to business. Up the airport drive, out the exit, and on to what’s left of the main drag, too skinny to take the punishment of the traffic. The proof of being far from home arrives around the first bend in this vein, in the form of the endless, smoky buzz-swarm of hundreds or a thousand mopeds and motorbikes, one metallic brittle that breaks and scatters like mercury for narrow bottlenecks and anything big that’s about to drift over into its lane. The big snake of bikes scurries right along at pace with the vans and cabs, like a rain of flies following elephants.

Check in at the hotel resort situation, swarmed again, this time by beautiful local women with drinks on little teak trays, cool cucumber towels in little bowls made of bone. Not having health care is not that bad when you can make it to a place like this for routine shit like kidney stones. The catch is, you have to drink enough to pony up for the ticket on debt at LAX, but it is a health care plan, so very basically speaking, America’s health care system is working just fine for Matthew. The paperwork comes over with keys in a discreet little leather binder that has no idea just how low the balance at the bank has dipped; the balance may be gone, in fact, below the line, in the red, in brackets, on to the overdraft protection with its interest, fangs, fees, and slimy coked-up, slicked-down, anything-you-need-now-you-can-pay-for-later demeanor. The binder is opened, the confidence is screwed up, the paperwork signed, and an entourage of
orange sarong and tan skin takes Matthew to the room so he can check right out, now that he’s checked right in.