untitled short story

Green doesn’t have his magazine. This is not good. Green never flies without a magazine. For a long while, he carried a specific issue; one of the major news weeklies from sometime in ’87. On the cover, the bright yellow letters spelling out “Détente” contrasted garishly against the florid, angry purple of Gorbachev’s trademark splotch. This magazine was, to Green, imbued with certain talismanic properties due to the integral role it played during the first flight of his life, which occurred when he was twenty five, and his survival through which was considered by him to be the result of considerable providence. Like many who undergo experiences in which they feel some special fortune has smiled upon them, Green developed the need, whenever a similar event was at hand, to re-create at least some small portion of the conditions under which the—to him, infinitesimal—chance of success (in Green’s case, survival) had been previously realized. It was not unlike many of the people I met during my stint in Gamblers’ Anonymous who, when making a particularly large or important bet, will don a certain hat, shirt, or pair of underwear that he or she has won a previous wager of commensurate import while wearing. I suppose, then, that this could have been called Green’s “lucky” magazine, but to represent it as such would hardly do justice in conveying the magnitude to which Green’s psyche demanded its presence. A more accurate analogy would be to a child’s favorite blanket, clutched and chewed at bedtime, affording the protection of the soothingly familiar against the unknowable void of night.
For a time, Green recognized only this specific issue as an acceptable amulet, an insistence that must have wreaked unimaginable havoc on the psyches of Green’s fellow passengers who, while dreamily rousing from mid-flight slumber in say, 1997—their eyes still adjusting to the gentle glow of the dimmed cabin lights—where greeted by a magazine cover reporting on a major socio-political happening which was known to most—on some core mental level down near the outright subconscious—to have occurred a full decade prior. Since the fact that newsmagazine covers are usually considered, on an equally primal and automatic level, to be reporting on current events, the mental toll exacted upon those unfortunate passengers —however fleeting their actual, Twilight Zone-ian confusion—I shudder to even consider.
Sometime around the millennium, the magazine had finally experienced enough of a certain type of advanced rotting and battering—the kind of molecular level destruction I have only witnessed elsewhere in certain ethnic takeout foods when left in refrigerators for considerable periods of time—that it became a ludicrous proposition to even carry the thing around anymore. The pages were so dried and desiccated from years of pressurized, re-circulated air that Green decided he would need one of those plastic covers which envelop magazines in public libraries simply to hold the thing together. Being unaware of any alternative methods of obtaining one of these unique items, Green, on an early summer day in 1999, absconded from the __ branch of the Philadelphia Public system, tottering down the ornate granite steps with a pronounced right side, stroke victim-ish limp, which charade he continued for a good five blocks, just to be safe. Ensconced in its new protective sheath, the issue lasted another couple of years. Eventually, though, it became clear that even this measure would be insufficient to prolong lifespan indefinitely, and Green—around the early Spring of 2002 and in a surprisingly nonplussed manner—related to me, as we taxied the tarmac on our way to an old fraternity brother’s wedding in Atlanta, that he had softened his stance somewhat. And so currently, the requirements are thus; the necessary magazine need not be any specific title or issue, but, in keeping with the “psychically-necessary-re-creation-of-conditions-under-which-successful-outcome-was-previously-achieved”/“lucky-hat” thing, it must be one of the major news glossies. It must be purchased—by Green—at an airport newsstand, not more than one hour before the official boarding time (as originally printed on the boarding pass, so as to eliminate the need to make multiple magazine purchases in the case of any delays). Most importantly, said periodical must be opened across Joshua Green’s lap for the duration of taxi, takeoff, landing, and taxi; not being read, necessarily, but lying there, like the napkin that my ex fiancée demanded I spread over my lap whenever we ate out at a restaurant (I always acquiesced, but this ritual napkin, ostensibly there to catch the torrent of crumbs and food bits that didn’t quite complete the journey from plate to mouth, seemed silly to me, as I have always been of the opinion that the ability to successfully transfer a forkful of chicken parm over a distance of eighteen inches with a success rate pretty close to one hundred percent is a skill one really should master well before entering the arena of public dining).
But so it has to be there, a magazine. He has to have it. This baroque little ritual has its initial origins in the fact that, until he was twenty five, Green was afraid to fly. Now, he wasn’t one of these people who are scared shitless but force themselves to do it anyway out of some need to triumph over what they see as a sort of personal weakness or character flaw in themselves. These types, which can often be observed while one sidles down the aisle toward one’s seat during boarding, are typically sweating and close-eyed and drinking ginger ale stirred flat, their trembling hands holding those squat plastic cups (which aren’t usually brought out until complimentary-drink time, fifteen minutes or so after takeoff, so that’s a dead giveaway right there as far as identifying these people, if the other hallmarks don’t jump out at you). A short time later, they’re paying rapt attention to the what-to-do-in-case-of-emergency demonstration, in some sort of willed denial of the fact that, if there does happen to be a mid-flight emergency, knowing where the giant blowup slide thing is located won’t be nearly as important as your current standing in the eyes of your deity of choice. No, Green was not one of those courageous yet vaguely discomfiting people. He simply would not get on an airplane, a standing refusal which caused him, and any traveling companions, major headaches as far as journey time and simplicity went, but that was how it was.
But then all of the sudden Green’s twenty five and he’s just got his MBA from a storied East Coast institution whose graduates tend to strategically display their degrees in pretty hard to miss places, and Green’s in the top fifth of his class and it’s the mid-eighties and investment banking is off the charts, average starting salary-wise, and one of the major I-banks wants him, so he’s pretty much won the lottery of right industry specialty, right time. Only thing is, they want him for this new “Emerging Pacific Markets” division they’ve set up, the headquarters of which is located, logically enough, in the Pacific; Honolulu to be exact. Now, a pretty much non-stop trans-continental railroad journey, immediately followed by an equally-hellishly-long sea voyage from San Diego to Honolulu would be a ludicrous enough proposition so as not to even warrant anything approaching serious consideration to the 95ish percent (I’m extrapolating from my own limited data set here) of the US population not absolutely certain that if they set foot on an airplane, said craft would, within minutes of becoming airborne, plunge to the ground spewing a horribly giant and billowing cloud of tar-black smoke. However, for those remaining few who, like Green circa ’87, do indeed subscribe to this notion, it is a totally rational travel method; indeed, it is the only method. One wonders if the unnecessarily and inefficiently lengthy transcontinental rail and sea travel industries subsist on the patronage of this population subset more or less entirely.
There was, however, another problem with this travel plan. The interval between the bank’s initial contact with Green to offer the interview and the time at which this interview would need to take place was three days. Apparently there was only one person who did interviews of prospective hires for the bank’s EPM sector, and this person was due to take her apparently prodigious interviewing skills back home to Santa Barbara for the funeral of a cousin who had been killed suddenly in a machine shop accident, the specifics of which were apparently quite horrifying. Green and I did, I must admit, speculate on the effect that this would have on her interviewing method and evaluation stringency. After some debate, we decided there was just no telling. But so Green would need to be there in three days. Postponement was not an option; the bank’s human resources department had hand picked ten candidates for the position and if Green had to put off his interview, it was pretty definite that they wouldn’t wait around for him and would offer the job to one of the other candidates, three of whom happened to be alumni of the same lauded business school as Green . He had three days. The train/boat method would take at least a week. The only way to get there in time would be by plane. Now, Green’s standing refusal to fly was, as I have said, pretty much widely known and accepted as one of his major, if not quite defining, character traits by anyone who knew him. Therefore, it was with more or less utter shock that I took his announcement that he would not, in fact, be saying thanks but no thanks to the people in Honolulu. After all, I-bank jobs at the time were, for people like Green, not exactly a once in a blue moon type of thing, and the odds were that this offer would merely be the first of many just as plum.
Green said little on the way to the airport. I kept my foot poised to hit the brake pedal, ready for him to call off the whole thing, maybe admit it was just to see if we would believe him. But as the exit ramps zoomed by, he did not waver. After seeing him off at the terminal door with the requisite stiff and desperately ironic inter-male hug, I decided to wait outside until his flight took off, should he back out at the last minute. I did this surreptitiously of course, so as not to shake his newfound bravery by appearing less than fully confident in him. An hour later, I watched from the top level of the parking garage as his plane sloped up into the bruise-purple of the early summer evening and banked sharply west out over the Allegheny. As I leaned back onto the hood of my battered Pontiac, my tongue at work trying to pry a mangled Gummi Bear loose from a molar, I found myself, for the first time I could remember, literally shaking my head in amazement. After all, the journey my friend had just embarked upon was not the typical first tentative toe into the aviatory waters typically undertaken by the aerophobic; no half hour puddle jump from Philly to DC was this. This was six hours racing the sun, miles up in a preposterously huge Boeing, slicing headlong through the jet stream while, far below, entire states whiz past before they even roll out the bags of peanuts. This, followed by a three hour layover at LAX; just enough time to really think about what, despite every fiber of your instinct kicking and screaming against it, you had just undertaken and had somehow—miraculously—survived, and then ask yourself whether you wanted to tempt fate all over again, only this time with not even solid ground underneath you, but instead the black bottomless Pacific, eager to swallow you up forever; the domain of circling, Cadillac-sized great whites with teeth like Ginsus, waiting to tear you into who knows how many equally sized portions. Maybe, should you somehow still be alive after your Icarian plummet from the heights you so brazenly assumed you had any right to ascend to, you’d be still be conscious when they started in.
Green called me as soon as he landed in Honolulu, and I was so glad he had made it through the flight without having any sort of large scale freak-out that I didn’t even mind that he had apparently forgotten about the whole time zone issue and that it was four in the morning in Pennsylvania. He explained how he’d been fine right up until he got into the airport, at which point the physical presence of all things uniquely airport—arrival and departure boards, luggage carts, strangely ambient music—had driven home the reality of the situation. His confidence had eroded pretty quickly, about two hours until he was to board, it neared the point of crumbling..
Rendered garrulous by nerves he struck up a conversation in the terminal food court with an elderly couple who were on their way to Miami, where they were to embark on a Caribbean cruise to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary. The husband, whom Green described as being immediately identifiable as a retired PE teacher (which impression turned out to be true, but this is not exactly a ringing endorsement for Green’s powers of deduction, as anyone who’s ever seen a retired PE teacher can attest), had been afraid to fly up until a few years before, when his brother had died and he needed to make it to the funeral, which was being held in Atlanta, in time. At the airport, the retired PE teacher had been so addled that he had had to run to the bathroom and vomit several times (I like to attribute the PE teacher’s disclosure of this tidbit of his own personal gastrointerological history to a complete stranger within five minutes of meeting him to his recognizing that Green, in his uneasy state, would appreciate someone opening up and laying bare the very personal details of his own battle with fear in a highly impressive display of emotional attunement on the PE teacher’s part, and not to the mere lack of couth which, I knew, was the more likely explanation).
The PE teacher’s wife, a short, sturdy woman with a dark orange tan and a permed helmet of hair almost exactly the same color, sipped a Mai Tai while relating to Green how, a few weeks prior to the Atlanta flight, she had been watching an afternoon talk show on the subject of anxiety, which was, according to a psychologist on the show’s panel—a mixed assembly of anxiety sufferers and experts—reaching near epidemic levels nationwide. During the portion of the talk show devoted to alleviating anxiety, the same psychologist had suggested that, despite being an obvious and hokey and not a particularly cutting-edge-sounding method, simply trying to take one’s mind off of what was making one anxious was, in many cases, a quite effective tactic. The key, according to the appropriately bewhiskered psychologist, was to find something that would really occupy one’s mind to such a degree that there would be no more thinking space left for whatever was making the sufferer nervous (“thinking space” wasn’t the actual term the psychologist used; the PE teacher’s wife had forgotten the exact word, but assured Green that “thinking space” pretty much gave the gist of it). To this end, the psychologist had recommended challenging crossword puzzles, particularly convoluted and intricately-plotted novels and films, and anything related to a significant hobby or interest one might have. The PE teacher’s wife relayed how the psychologist had stressed that it was important for the anxiety sufferer’s mind to be engaged to a level sufficient to prevent it from recognizing that the distraction from the anxiety-causing event was simply an artificial barrier or insulation, and really allow it to essentially forget about whatever impended. The psychologist had ended his dissertation—in an affable attempt to good naturedly offset the clinical, mumbo-jumbo-ish nature of his previous remarks—by saying that, in short, the distraction better be pretty damned interesting.
The talk show psychologist’s advice suddenly popped into the head of the PE teacher’s wife while her poor husband was engaged in another of his increasingly frequent men’s room visits, and she hurried to the terminal’s gift shop in hopes of finding something he could use to take his mind off of the flight. Knowing him to be the reader of only the occasional book, and these mostly historical tomes on previous centuries’ strange and faraway wars, she skipped past the best-seller rack, instead making a beeline toward the newsstand. The PE teacher had subscribed to both of the sports magazines displayed, and mostly gotten through the latest issues of each already, so she moved over to the automotive section. She cursed aloud when she remembered that, during a particularly long wait at the optometrist’s office the week prior, she had personally observed her husband—whom she had accompanied because the pupil dilating agent the optometrist used would make it impossible for him to drive home afterward—read both of the monthly auto magazines the newsstand offered pretty much from cover to cover. Distraught, and on the verge of suggesting her husband perhaps simply pay a visit to the terminal bar, she noticed a periodical dealing with her husband’s only other area of any real interest, the collecting of old and rare coins. Surprised that a publication with such a niche audience would be among the limited selection at the small newsstand, she reached out for it quickly, as if to preclude any other flight-wary numismatist with designs on the publication from snatching up the issue ahead of her. When she lifted the magazine from the bottom rack and discovered that it had been the last copy left, she felt the singular and unmistakable tingle of otherworldly intervention. Thus emboldened, she returned to the gate area, where she found the (at the time, newly-) retired PE teacher, who was by now green-tinged and hunched forward, head in hands, with damp, curling strands of graying hair dangling through the spaces between his fingers.
At this point, the PE teacher’s wife took an especially long sip of her Mai-Tai, and her husband, as if taking this as a cue, picked up the narration. It was becoming evident that this was far from the inaugural telling of the couple’s story, a fact about which Green didn’t quite know how to feel. The PE teacher, who was drinking an unsweetened iced tea he had gone to purchase while his wife had been telling her portion of the story, said that when she handed him the old and rare coin collecting magazine, she didn’t tell him anything about the psychologist she had seen on the afternoon talk show, since doing so would have made it obvious to him that the magazine was intended as a distraction, an artificial barrier, and thus he would not have been able to devote the undivided attention to it that was necessary for the whole shebang to work.
Since the retired PE teacher had been off getting his unsweetened iced tea during the time when his wife was talking about the psychologist and his advice, and would thus have had no way of knowing that Green knew anything about any afternoon talk show psychologist, Green took this as further evidence that their narration was strangely rehearsed. It was as if the couple had tried out a slew of different permutations as far as the way in which they related their story—who told which parts and when they switched, even the drinks they each drank, etc.—and had settled on this incarnation as the most effective. Green hoped this was the case, that they had already had things pretty much perfected, and this particular telling wasn’t also just a trial run to work out the remaining kinks. But he quickly chastised himself for being so coldly analytical about the couple, who were, lets face it, just trying to help him out.
The PE teacher went on to explain how he had been dubious about the magazine at first, and had even chided his wife for being so insensitive to his condition that she would even think that leafing through a periodical was something he’d be anything close to wanting to do at the time. However, bereft of anything else to do but wait for the next sojourn to the bathroom, he began to do just that, and quickly found himself engaged in the story of a man from Topeka, Kansas, who had bought a dresser for ten dollars at a yard sale, only to discover, wedged into the runner beneath the bottom drawer, an RARE COIN—an insanely rare and thus desirable item to collectors of such things—which had subsequently been sold at auction for close to half a million dollars. The article, accompanied by a full color picture of the man grinning toothily as he cradled the Lucite case that held the dull-colored and fairly unimpressive looking coin, had been of such interest to the PE teacher (who had heard several other stories similar to that of the fortuitous Kansan, and who had thus spent much of his newly available post-retirement free time perusing yard sales, junk stores, and pawn shops in hopes of making a similar find) that he had been only peripherally aware of boarding the plane, and even the great twin rushes of sound and pressure upon takeoff hadn’t been more than tertiarily felt; like the low hum of a TV set, barely audible from the next room, is how the PE teacher had described it. It was only when he finished the article about the Kansan, ten or so minutes after takeoff, that he even really noticed he was in the air. A bit of the old fear did come burbling up, he admitted, but before it could wreak any serious havoc, he dove into the next article, this about the controversy swirling over a well known coin collector, twenty five percent of whose collection, it had just been discovered, had turned out to be comprised of forgeries. Whether this was unbeknownst to the collector—as he had claimed—was the point of contention; the article seemed to have been written with a forgiving slant.
At this point, the second boarding call was made for the couple’s flight to Miami, and so the conclusion of the PE teacher’s story was delivered in hurriedly abridged version as he gathered up the small suitcase and duffel bag that comprised the couple’s carry on luggage. As the final call was being made, the PE teacher and his wife each placed a reassuring hand on Green’s shoulders, one on each side, and told him not to worry, that there was a higher chance of being killed in a car accident than in a plane crash and so he’d already survived the most dangerous part of the trip, and that he’d be fine if he could just find himself something he could really dive into to take his mind off of how scared he was.
Green thanked them, and they turned away with warm smiles and calm, clear eyes. They didn’t turn back at the door to the gangway, as Green had expected them to. This, he told me on the phone, was strangely comforting. It was as if the couple had anointed him in some way, had blessed him, and were confident that he would require nothing more from them; that the sage wisdom they had just imparted was sufficient.
It was shortly after the retired PE teacher and his wife had left him that Green picked out the news weekly with Gorbachev on the cover. As he was a hopefully-soon-to-be businessman, he was interested in the possible market effects that could result from the relaxing of Russo-American tensions, and this issue’s cover story was a roundtable discussion among economists and sundry intellectuals dealing with this topic exactly.
As he settled into one of the terminal’s seats, which was hard and thinly padded to prevent people from falling asleep on it during long layovers and missing their connecting flights, Green began to feel a bit absurd.
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Green interviewed well, and was hired. He got promoted three times in five years, and eventually ascended to what he described as sort of an upper-middle/lower-upper level in the complexly stratified and labyrinthine structure of these types of financial institutions. He eventually bought a three story house on a white sand beach, married a former suntan lotion spokesmodel with whom he had two healthy and beautiful children, and pretty much lived the dream for eight years. His job required Green to travel to various Pacific islands and islets, often times flying into tiny airstrips in ancient prop planes, all of which he handled with aplomb. He visited what he now called “the lower 48” quite often as well, and seemed to have gotten over his fear of flying more or less totally, so long as he had his trusty magazine in hand.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must here admit that I myself am not exactly a fan of flying—which is, admittedly, a fairly harrowing idea when you think about it—and have thus developed an internal mechanism of my own, to cope. I suspect that this is true of the vast majority of people who fly, whether or not they even know they are doing it. You can see it. Some people chat amicably with complete strangers in adjacent seats, while others lay back and close their eyes, trying to appear so confident in the intricate mechanisms of the plane—groaning and shifting all around as each part carries out its cryptic role in the epic task of holding a hundred or so human beings aloft and transporting them across vast distances at the speed of sound—so sure are they that these myriad parts will all carry out their respective jobs that they don’t even feel any particular need to be conscious. This is what they want us to think that they think.
My own ritual is somewhat more esoteric. Basically, I imagine the plane doing exactly what I fear it might. Engine failure, a wing snapping off in midair, the cabin splitting open and passengers being sucked out like ants into a Dirt Devil; I see all of this and more, in as vivid detail as I can muster. My reasoning here; I am of course totally cognizant of the infinitesimal possibility of any of these things actually occurring. But, I figure, if the chance of anything catastrophic happening is already so remote, then what are the chances of something happening at exactly the same time that I’m thinking about it happening? I figure we’re nearing statistically insignificant here. Of course I don’t need a refresher course in probability to realize the fallacy of this type of thinking. That’s exactly the point. It’s silly and self-deluding, but it works. It’s effectiveness lies not in the objective sense, but rather in the feeling of control and order and familiarity that it produces, which is really just as valuable, when it comes down to it.
I’m currently finding it difficult to concentrate on my precious catastrophes, however. Green is starting to freak out. He first realized he’d forgotten to buy a magazine approximately three seconds before the forward hatch was closed. Being aware of the strictness with which airline crew typically adhered to company and FAA policy, Green only halfheartedly asked the nearest attendant if he could run back out to the terminal for just a quick second. After she responded as expected—kind but firm refusal, accompanied by a sympathetic smile and quick outline of the rationale behind the no opening doors rule-