Amy Falls Down (26 page)

When to take the Klonopin? If Amy dry-swallowed them now, she would with luck be affected for the full duration of her direct flight to New York. She read the instructions, which Maxine had folded around the pills when she’d stuck them into the DVD package, and according to these she should take only one Klonopin, because more than one could cause “drowsiness, alterations in mental status, confusion, coma, and respiratory arrest,” all of which sounded promising. Except perhaps confusion. If she were confused into imagining she was home with Alphonse, fine, but might she turn into one of those creatures who become shrieking Jeremiahs and have to be pried off the emergency exit door at 30,000 feet? Or worse, what if she became voluble, spilling her guts to bored neighbors, swiping their drinks, groping them, sniping at photos of their grandchildren? Loss of control, Amy knew, lay at the heart of pteromechanophobia. She knew this because she’d read up on it a few hours earlier. She had known it anyway, since a monkey could figure it out. All forms of public transportation involved handing over control of life and limb to strangers; flying called on Herculean feats of denial in sentient, earthbound animals. Put them both together, and full-blown panic is the most rational of responses.

All around her, as they waited for takeoff, people fiddled with their seatbacks, leafed through magazines, stared out the window with unfocused eyes. They were thinking about the people and places they were leaving behind; in a few hours, they would anticipate disembarking, hugging relatives, hailing taxis. They took so much for granted. Amy, who seldom envied anyone, envied all of them and wished mightily for a stupidity pill.
Stupefaxopram. Panglossonil.
Something that would leave her inhibitions alone and just crank up her denial mechanism, which she pictured as a frozen set of gears in the back of her brain, rusted from disuse.
Pollyannazam.
The first-class cabin was warm, the seats swiveled, and her neighbor’s seat was over a foot away. She thought of offering him her window seat—Amy could not have cared less where she was sitting when everything went south—but he was already settled in, setting up his laptop on a tray. There was a television screen in front of her. Apparently she could download and watch two hundred fifty movies. That might be more distracting than the pre-flight safety demonstration, which was accomplished (after the attendant announced she was about to do it) entirely in pantomime, some bits of which were apparently intended to be droll. She indicated exits as though voguing; she demonstrated the use of the safety belt by first wrapping it around her head and then wagging her finger
no
. Passengers ignored her, in marked contrast to the raucous stomping and applause emanating from the economy section, whose attendant was apparently rapping. Max, who loved to fly, would have hated both performances. No one has the right, he would say, to perform anything before a captive audience. He suffered his last hospital stay in a room with two other dying men, both of whom slept through full-blast broadcasts of
Night Court, My Two Dads,
and
Mission Impossible.
Amy always shut it off, and the next day it would be on again. The night before he died, Amy unplugged the TV and twisted off one of the prongs with a pair of pliers. He managed a smile then, and a thumbs-up, but Amy couldn’t forgive herself for not doing it earlier.

Having hours ago researched the soothing effects of biofeedback, she elected to remain physically calm during the runway taxi: her breathing stayed slow and shallow, even at the moment of liftoff, even during the climb. She of course ignored the window. She swallowed and swallowed to ease her protesting ears, and so far it all seemed to be happening to someone else, someone who, though unhappy to be there, was disengaged with the plane’s behavior, disinterested in her own fate. Perhaps
this
was denial: she had willed herself into it, and now she pretended—successfully—to be engaged in a thought experiment, a virtual flight. That was it: she was virtually on this plane. How clever of her stomach to register virtual weightlessness. As a thought experiment, this was going brilliantly, but she trusted it wouldn’t last. She flagged a passing attendant, scored some sparkling water, and popped one of the Klonopin.

This was in fact her third flight. Her first, a round-trip flight from Boston to Trinidad in 1971, had been pleasant enough. She had been newly married, and she and Max had settled on separate honeymoons—he flew to Madrid and she visited a couple of lovers, one in the Islands, one in the Navy. She had actually enjoyed most of the trip, despite the absurd route (on the way home, on top of the planned stopover in Pensacola, the travel agency had arranged for her to change flights in Atlanta and New York City), and despite the fact that a landing-gear light had at one point malfunctioned, forcing passengers to assume the crash position just in case. Now she could remember the general hilarity on that Eastern flight when the captain told everybody not to panic and a brand-new stewardess, in the middle of describing the crash position, began to shake and cry, her voice rising in volume and pitch, and was wrestled into a seat and strapped in by two burly sailors. Amy had giggled along with the others, imagining, even before the plane touched down, how she would describe the scene to Max. “I was really afraid,” she later told him, “which is probably why the whole thing was so funny.” But she hadn’t been really afraid. She had been twenty-four years old. She had experienced only virtual fear.

Seventeen years later, flying to Rochester, Minnesota with a desperately ill Max, she did not even register the journey out, because they were on their way to Mayo, the Lourdes of the New World, where Amy had convinced herself that Max could get on some experimental program and magically prolong his life. She had focused so grimly on this outcome that when it didn’t happen, when the doctors there were as clueless as they had been at Mass General, as hopeless as Calvary, she, not Max, had broken down, without warning enduring a full-blown panic attack as they lifted off the icy runway, and Max, all skin and bones by then, no muscle tone at all, had held her still by force of will, preventing her from doing something that, he kept assuring her, she would never live down. All the way to Logan he held her, hectoring, cracking jokes, singing songs. He spun scatological tales about the Clinic personnel; made up a silly show tune called “Hold the Mayo”; he dug the
Chanson de Roland
out of his carry-on and read the whole thing to her in French. The plane’s interior was a poor illusion, a fragile construct, willed into being by all the happy idiots around her, and only Amy could see through to the truth, that there was just this pitiless void, and the two of them inside it, tiny, withering, and Amy shook herself apart almost, and hid her face, herself, in Max. “Now,” he said as they shuffled off the plane in Boston, “don’t you feel silly?”

Now Amy began to relax just a tiny bit. They had been airborne for an hour, and she had admitted and made peace with those terrible airplane sounds, the hum and whine of machines, the insectile chirpings of the pilot, and with the artificial air, and the rhythmic mumble of far-off conversations. There was nothing out the window to frighten her. She took out her notepad again and wrote “Barking at Ants.” She was about to put it away, but then kept writing. This never happened to her—she always let a title settle into her head before fooling with it—but now she was anxious to get started. It would be easy enough to weave Alphonse’s midnight windmill-tilting into a larger story. She was three pages in when she realized that the larger story was trite, a stupid thing about a pathologically even-tempered family with a chronically outraged dog who sniffed out suppressed anger and then for some cartoonish reason took it all into himself. The family—Downtrodden Dad, Frustrated Mom, Warring Children—was terrible, but the dog was great, and Amy tore up the pages and started again. She would write a dog story. Jack London had gotten there first, except that he hadn’t, because his dog only needed to keep his person
alive
, not
happy
. He hadn’t had to grapple with human neurosis. Because she stayed in the dog’s POV, the family (unchanged, as boring as ever) became background noise, like that engine whine, little tin food gods, which would have been fine with the dog, except that they expected some sort of daily interaction with him, and the shorter ones couldn’t be counted on to let him outside often enough. He tolerated the gods but hated the house, especially the doors. The house was a metaphysical obscenity. That the gods loved the house was plain, as was the fact that they appreciated that the house was set down and shut off from a larger place. “Outside” was one of their favorite words, along with “inside”: they were always saying them to him in a high pitch, and when he was younger he would bark wildly, knowing that this would get them to open the door, but the aging dog knew better, that outside was no different from inside, and Amy stopped writing because the whole thing was collapsing into some dreadful eco-fable. Also the passenger to her left had snapped his laptop shut and leaned toward her. “Excuse me,” he said, smiling widely, showing her all his teeth. “May I tell you a secret?”

*   *   *

His name was Patrice Garrotte and he had a number of secrets, foremost of which he spilled immediately. “I recognized you right away,” he said, his voice at once honeyed and reedy; he sounded like Dan Duryea making a prank call, and his Bette Davis eyes were milky brown. At first, he batted his lashes like a belle, but as he honed in on her, he stopped blinking completely. “I’ve read each of your books. Of course I was hesitant to disturb you.” His breath smelled bright green, as though he had just been chewing parsley.

Amy focused on these sensory details in order to disappear into the experience of Patrice Garrotte and so spend precious seconds, perhaps even minutes, doing something besides poke at her dormant pteromechanophobia. Besides Maxine, nobody living had read all her works. Garrotte was old, but younger than she. Besides, how had he recognized her? Was he some sort of plant? Had Maxine sent him?

“You are much lovelier than the photograph on your Facebook page,” he said.

“I don’t have a Facebook page.”

“Actually, you have three, but only one looks authentic, and they all use the same picture. The one in which you’re standing in front of your house.”

What picture? What Facebook page? The authentic one must be Maxine’s work.

Telepathic Patrice Garrotte had already reopened his notebook, typed an imprecation, and now showed her the Facebook page, with Holly Antoon’s hideous snapshot splayed across the upper left corner. On her profile page was an Amy Gallup Photo Album with JPEGS of her old book covers. There were regular posts about scheduled radio interviews and a big stupid thing about the televised CNET show, which, Amy had to remind herself, was due to take place in a few hours.
As if
. According to this page, Amy had 713 friends, all strangers.

“I take it you’re en route to the Whither Publishing Conference.”

“Unfortunately.” Amy had decided to continue this conversation, in part because she was almost curious, in part because the plane had begun a series of midair hiccups. Passengers walking the aisles grabbed seat backs and righted themselves, pretending—she could see the pretense in the set of their shoulders—that the hiccups were perfectly normal. Amy’s many doomsday scenarios had never included the plane disintegrating without the aid of lightning, a bomb, or another plane, but of course that could turn on a dime, and Patrice Garrotte offered her shelter, slowed her heartbeat. Maybe he would produce a weapon. A little one, incapable of penetrating the skin of the plane. A knife. After all, she had had a knife pulled on her before, and that hadn’t worked out badly.

“Are you in … publishing?” she asked him. She already had him pegged as an unpublished writer trolling for connections, or perhaps for a sympathetic ear. Perhaps he had a wrinkled, parsley-stained manuscript secreted about his person. Perhaps she would actually read it.

He laughed, so sharply that a little boy in front of Amy peered over the seat, stared fearfully, and popped down out of sight. Patrice laughed without closing his eyes or taking them off of Amy’s face. How did he keep them moist? Amy found herself wishing for Internet access—which, in fact, she could achieve in seconds through the laptop port before her, only she couldn’t very well search right in front of him for “blink reflex” and find out whether protuberant unblinking eyes were a sign of some organic mental disease. “Not at all,” said Patrice Garrotte. “I am merely a dedicated reader.”

How dedicated? Amy wondered.

“In the most literal sense,” he said. “I am a sponge.” His eyes twinkled, or rather did the parched equivalent of twinkling. “As opposed to a sandglass or strain bag. Sadly, I am not a mogul diamond. Unlike you.”

A sponge, a sandglass.
Who was he quoting? Amy had the distinct impression that she had better remember, although she kept speculating about the twinkling mechanism. How do eyes twinkle, anyway? She should definitely write that Twinkle story, the one about her pervy pediatrician. Garrotte’s had the dull satin sheen of dolls’ eyes. Stony eyes, she thought, that in the moon did glitter, and then she got it. “I’m afraid that these days I’m more of a strain bag than a diamond. I’d be content to be a sponge.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge had categorized readers into types. The sandglass reader just reads to pass the time; the strain bag retains only the bits of pulp that haven’t slipped through the net. The sponge was obvious. She couldn’t remember what the mogul diamond was, except that it was the best.

“You’re too modest,” he said. “I’ve been following you on NPR. Your words are an inspiration.”

“I wasn’t aware,” said Amy, “that I was putting myself out there as an authority on reading. In fact, I don’t read much anymore.”

“Precisely! You’ve told us all to put down our books. You’re an inspiration,” he said again.

The captain interrupted with an unintelligible speech about the right side of the plane. He sounded breezy, so probably there wasn’t anything amiss with the right side of the plane, the side that Amy was on. Still, the damage had been done: she had been reminded that she was on a plane.