Carbine: Stories

Flight

 Flight = It was not him. It was some other man. In his house, a clock had been a precious thing. Almost every thing was a precious thing. His blanket. A thin, worn blanket worn nearly through when it came to him. Often he’d read, in those days, of prisoners with their thin blankets. And he identified with them, with his. All imaginary of course. He was a boy safe and snug and not a prisoner at all. Yet he’d pull that thin blanket to his chin and pretend he was a prisoner . Unjustly imprisoned. He wondered why that fantasy, outside of the blanket, had had such appeal for him. A desire for a kind of order, perhaps. Perhaps any order no matter how harsh, so long as one could understand one’s place in it. He realized he did not want what he’d always said he’d wanted. No, he wanted nothing of the sort, and thank God he’d never been close to getting it. This realization about his spoken desires, much less some boyhood thought of prison. It was too tiring to think about and he was too tired to think about it and thinking about it led to other ideas, other thoughts, other fantasies he had at one time or another entertained so tiresome that dealing with them would wear him, he feared, to nothing. All of this as he sat cramped and strapped in an airplane. At least he was headed home. At least that. In spite of the weariness, the boredom, the discomfort and the thin- edged anxiety that even now accompanied him in flight, that. And that before he thought of the poet. He was hungry. He knew if he waited they’d bring him something to drink and something to eat—pretzels maybe or peanuts or perhaps a cookie. He was hungry because he didn’t like to eat before he got on a plane because he didn’t, really, know how his stomach might react, whether he might feel bad, feel worse than he always felt when he was on an airplane, so he was used to flying hungry. It was part of the whole thing. The plane, the hotel, the plane. The poet. They had worked hard putting together what they’d needed to put together on this trip. Worked through lunch. There was no lunch. Stopped at a bar later, still working, and eaten some peanuts with the beer. Too late for lunch then. He had to work whether he was hungry or not. He owed his duty to work, not to appetite, although it was not this way for everyone. But he knew it was this way for him. It seemed at some time he may have had a choice though he could not remember making the choice nor could he identify the time when he might have elected to choose. But he believed he had—perhaps unwittingly—chosen, and when he had chosen, it seemed apparent now, he’d made the wrong choice. So now if there was work—compelling work—he was compelled to work through mealtimes regardless of what the clock said. It had something to do with loyalty. He wasn’t sure how. Or to what. And pick it up later. Get something on the way in or order something from room service at the hotel. He’d never gotten used to eating in a hotel. Or sleeping in one. Those sheets. What if a virus lived in them? Probably not, mostly unlikely, but how could one know? And while a virus might not be there today, one could mutate and live there tomorrow. Didn’t that happen every day? The viruses in the cooling tanks, in the dust, in the vegetable sprayers at the supermarket. The hotel dirty below the level of sight, fraught with microscopic menace. But he stayed there. More and more. More nights away every year. And for want? No use in thinking about that. Why let it torment him further? Why wouldn’t it die? He had asked himself, he was always asking himself, you want to spend the rest of your life in meetings? It was the airplane. That wasn’t all of it, obviously, but certainly there was nothing like the strapped and cramped experience of flight to depress him, to force some grim and pointless examination of his life he’d rather  Flight [3.139.72.78] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 08:19...