The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (3 page)

We ran out of the ham and cheese sandwiches within six weeks, despite the rationing, and the pretzels were eaten within the next month after that. At first, we were disappointed that we had no more food, until it dawned on us that, unless the Pilot wanted to starve himself or, even if he had been hoarding his own supplies in the cockpit, unless he wanted to circle Dallas with a plane full of the starved and emaciated and, eventually, dead, he would have to finally land.

A full two days passed after the last bag of pretzels had been emptied before the Pilot finally came out of his cockpit. Expecting him to admit defeat, or to inform us of his plans to land in some remote island in the Pacific or simply to crash us into the earth (by then, anything would have been preferable to the constant sight of the city below us), we waited patiently for him to speak. He frowned and looked down at his feet. “As you are probably all now aware, we have run out of food, which means we must now draw straws to see who of us will be the first to be eaten.” He paused as we each looked at our neighbor, and perhaps if he had actually made us try to eat one another, we would have then risen up, wrested control of the plane from him, found a way to land, ended the ordeal. But before we could do or say anything, he smiled broadly at us and laughed, saying, “No, no, no. I’m just joking.” He then proceeded to walk down the aisle, pulling out a bag he’d hidden behind his back, and began to hand out small vials of a clear liquid to each passenger as he passed. With each vial handed out, he would repeat, “Two drops should do. No more than two drops. Don’t want to overdo it. Two drops should do just fine.” Once he was finished, he walked to the front of the plane again, turned to us, and said, “Bon appétit,” and then stepped back into his cockpit, the door closing solidly behind him.

As we ran low on drops, the Pilot would bring us new vials.

I’m not sure how they work or what sustenance they provide. While I am still hungry after my two drops, while I still have an insatiable appetite and the desire for some unnameable flavor in my mouth (the drops at first had a mild grassy taste to them, but are now as good as flavorless, as I can’t taste anything at all, or else I seem to have forgotten almost entirely what anything might taste like) and I have lost weight and will probably continue to lose weight, I have not starved. As far as I know, no one who has taken the drops has.

The Pilot would come out of his cabin two or three times a day. As he grew older and as his blond hair turned, in places, white, I began to wonder how he felt in the mornings when he woke up, if he felt as old and tired as I sometimes felt.

I assumed he slept. He locked the cabin door at night, so none of us knew for sure. I asked him once if he slept and he didn’t answer me, and then I asked him, if he did sleep, who flew the plane. He laughed and patted his belly and said, “My copilot.” When I asked him, recently, if his copilot would also be the one to fly the plane once he has died, he did not respond, pretending not to have heard my question.

It is surprising to me how quickly news of the hijacking spread. I called my wife within the hour of being told we had been hijacked, and she already knew. The people of Dallas organized a vigil that very night. We could see the huddled bunch of them with their candles standing on the tarmac of the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. Someone—a gentleman from the rear of the plane—said, “Them standing there, we couldn’t land even if we wanted to.” In the morning, the same group of people (or perhaps a new group) stood in approximately the same formation, this time holding white posters with black letters on them that spelled out something too small for us to read.

For a while, I liked to think of my wife there among them, holding a candle or a piece of the message, but, in truth, my wife does not like crowds, and it’s more likely that she was not.

Within a week, regardless of my wife’s involvement or lack thereof, the vigils had stopped, the news reports, I’m almost certain, had stopped as well, and we had become a fixture of the Dallas skyline, no different or more exciting than the neon Mobile Pegasus.

II.

I often find myself considering the man my wife married, by which I usually mean myself, a thought that then returns me to the fact that she has since remarried, and so I am forced to think of the two of us, her husband and I, side by side. This despite the fact that I have never seen him, which leads me, more often than not, to picture myself side by side my other self so that I might consider how the two of us have failed and how we continue to fail as husbands. I have a cataloged list in my head; it grows by the day, and it changes nearly constantly as faults are moved around, given more or less priority, my dirty underwear left on the bathroom floor moved down a rung by the peanut-butter-encrusted knife left for a week in the backseat of my car. When I get into this mood of rearranging faults—real and imagined—I begin to wonder, too, what the other passengers, those who are left, are thinking. We are not friends, any of us. Of course, we were all friends at first, or, at the very least, friendly with those people to our left or our right or across the aisle, as people on a plane tend to be, in that manner of searching for common ground in a book being read, a destination being reached, a vacation being taken. With the underlying sense that these friendships would last no longer than the few hours between Dallas and Chicago, we opened ourselves up to our neighbors. These relationships were made stronger once the plane was hijacked, as we felt bonded to one another by a shared sense of tragedy and uncertainty. Then, as time passed, as we continued to circle, as we realized just how long we might have to share the same space with one another, we—I am projecting now—began to feel crowded, as if there wasn’t enough room, and slowly we gathered ourselves inward, pulling knees into our chests, feet onto the seats, curling our arms around our shins, and placing our heads down or, if we could stomach the sight, pressing our faces away from our neighbors and against the windows. Now the plane is still and quiet, and we have been moving with such regularity for so long that I have this sense of perfect unmovement, which creeps into the pit of my stomach and produces there a soft fluttering of wings and a welling anxiety, as if I had forgotten to do some minor but personal thing, or as if I were riding a child’s ride at a fair, the dips not enough to be truly belly-rising, but raising, instead, a tingling awareness of gravity, or gravitas, in my arms and shoulders and legs; a feeling that is at once pleasant and upsetting.

When we were still talking—the other passengers and I—the woman who sat next to me and who had once asked that I store some of her bags beneath my seat told me, breathlessly and as she sat down, officially the last person to board the plane and take her seat, how she had nearly missed the flight and how she had had to beg and argue and plead with the gate attendants to let her on board. I explained to them, she told me, how the shuttle had had a flat and how someone was supposed to have called ahead to tell someone about the situation, and that we had somehow convinced the first tow-truck driver to squeeze us into his cab and drive us to the airport so that we could all make our flights on time, but by then, with rush hour traffic, and even with the tow truck flashing its yellow lights, it took us over an hour to move through the accidents and the stalled cars, and by the time we arrived at the entrance to the airport, I only had fifteen minutes to get my baggage checked and run to my gate, and after all of that, do you believe that they almost didn’t let me on the plane? How did you convince them? I invariably asked, to which she replied, Why, honey, with my feminine charm. It was an amazing story the way she told it, embellished and repeated often to the others around her as we taxied down the runway, and in those first few minutes in the air before the Pilot came out of the cockpit and hijacked us all, and then, much later, she began repeating the story again, though lamentably and with less energy, as if she were reciting the Act of Contrition; and with each successive dirge, more and more details of the story were removed until finally, late one night a month or so into our circling, she turned her head to me and confessed that in fact there was no flat tire, no tow-truck driver, no real traffic even, but that she had overslept, and that’s why she had almost missed her flight. If only I had slept ten minutes longer, she said, and then she turned her head to face straight again, and, while I’m sure she must have said something else between then and the time she passed away, I cannot remember what else that might have been. Now, however, I repeat her story to myself, having adopted it as my own, except that sometimes the tow-truck driver refuses to carry us in his cab and we are forced to hail down a woman driving with her baby in a station wagon, and she’s the one who brings us to the airport on time, and sometimes I will catch myself thinking,
If only she hadn’t picked us up,
and despite the fact that the story, which is not even mine, has never been true, I cannot help but feel a keen disappointment in the fact that such an insignificant event has led me to this end.

III.

When the Pilot died, it came to light that he in fact did have a copilot. The pregnant woman’s son, it turned out, had been spending more and more time in the Pilot’s cabin, learning the technique of flying, learning the secrets of our perpetual oil. At first, we were relieved. The Pilot was gone, we could finally land, and the boy, now a young man, would certainly land the plane, just as his mother had asked him to. But, of course, why should he? In a way, it made more sense to us—perhaps not to the boy’s mother—that we continued to circle Dallas even after the Pilot’s death. In all of our time circling with the Pilot, we never learned, were never told why we could not land, why we had been hijacked. Now that the boy was in charge, though, what else should he have done? What other world did he know but this one inside the plane? Would he so easily give up its comforts, its familiarity?

Most of us had some memory of what it was like to stand straight, to walk on an object that does not so noticeably move, to breathe air that has not been cycled and recycled a hundred thousand times, and even we were a little afraid of what our lives would become if we were to finally land on solid ground. The prospect of seeing a building up close and from below must have been a devastating and frightening one for the boy. Despite his mother’s weeping and crumpled body outside the Pilot’s door, he did not alter the Pilot’s original course, not even to change the direction of our circle.

Shortly after the Pilot hijacked the plane, he had us pose for pictures taken with a Polaroid camera. As with everything else, he did not explain why he wanted these pictures. The flight attendants had us stand in front of the lavatory between first class and coach, and after the picture was taken and had developed, they let each of us look at our photograph before placing it in a box with the rest of them that was eventually handed over to the Pilot.