Call Me Zebra(21)
The Boeing 747 rumbled down the runway and took off into a misty gray sky. The plane was buffeted by strong crosswinds. It spat and skidded its way through a mass of clouds. Once we were airborne, a flight attendant emerged in the feeble, dimmed light of the cabin. She came down the aisle in a superhero pose, legs spread wide for balance, both arms up against the overhead luggage compartments. It was clear she was expecting severe turbulence. With a shrill voice, she announced, “Seat belts!” She leaned over my neighbor—a middle-aged woman with a moist, round face, who was already fast asleep—to make sure she had strapped herself into her seat.
There was something austere and unforgiving about the flight attendant’s features: the drooping corners of her thin and forbidding mouth; her eyebrows, which were narrowed into blades; her square chin; her face, which reminded me of the corpse-strewn deserts of that no-man’s-land I had traversed so long ago with my mustached father. That land that drew everything toward itself and returned nothing, the land where my mother was buried. I looked through the window. The sky was as white as the sheet my father had been wrapped in before he was slipped into his casket. It occurred to me: There is no longer any “we” to speak of. I am alone.
At that precise moment, an alarming noise originated from the right engine. It lasted a few seconds. Long enough to cause a great deal of uneasy shuffling in the cabin. Everyone was agitated, everyone except my neighbor, who was still sleeping. People were looking out the window at that measureless white sky and then turning away from it to scrutinize one another, the plane. Some flailed their arms. Others sat rigidly, holding their breath. I could see steam coming out of their mouths and ears. The steam of war, I thought, and stuck my neck out to study the anxious faces of the passengers. What if someone is sitting here with bombs strapped to their person or with explosives stuffed in their shoes? Someone who is eager to die, to take everyone else down with them.
I shrank into my seat. The captain came on the intercom and hopelessly announced: “Be advised, we are going through a storm.” I heard a wave of whispers spread through the cabin. It was unbearably hot. People were muttering in different languages, crying, holding hands with their neighbors. This was the other 99.9 percent, the world’s numbskulls, its sheltered amateurs. I had enclosed myself in a plane with them. I thought of Rousseau. “What about me,” I murmured. “Cut off from them and from everything else, what am I?”
I sat there contemplating the question for a while. What am I? I considered my options: a brute, a pitiable creature, nothing. Then I heard my father answer from a faraway place: “The .1 percent,” he grunted. If he were alive, he would have taken me by the scruff of the neck, and said: Child! Enfant! Get a grip on your death!
The swift communiqué from my father galvanized my spirit. I felt as fit as a fiddle. I removed the in-flight magazine from the seat pocket in front of me. As the plane rocked and rolled through the sky, I skimmed glossy picture after glossy picture. I looked at infinity pools, light-flooded hospitals, fluorescent images of brains, ornately plated molecular foods, biodegradable coffins. My father’s coffin was made out of the cheapest materials. Papier-maché, cardboard, recycled paper—how should I know? I felt a sharp sting in my void at the thought of his body being buried in that misshapen New World. I looked at my neighbor. Was she dead? Her chest was rising and falling. So she was alive but sleeping, as unmoved as a stone.
I inspected the 99.9 percent. I met the gaze of a bald, bearded man who was sitting across the aisle and had the dignified look of a Renaissance man. His hand was shaking. He was nervous. He stroked his beard; it was heavily perfumed. I got a waft of lavender, sage, mint. I felt sorry for him. I thought, this man deserves to know the truth. The truth about life. His beard is asking for it. Besides, why should I keep my wisdom, hard-earned in the trenches of literature, to myself when I could be providing him with ground-breaking perspective?
I echoed my father. “Life,” I said to the man, “is brutal, savage; it will wear you down.” After a brief pause, I came into my own. “You could be struck by the whip of uncertainty at any moment”—he stroked his beard again (his mouth had fallen open and I could see his lips were thin and chapped)—“and what can a two-legged rodent like you do in the midst of all that uncertainty except rise above the flotsam and jetsam?”
He had square yellow teeth. He pointed at himself, and weakly asked: “Are you speaking to me?”
“No,” I lied, smiling softly at him. It was a hopeless cause trying to help him. I leaned into my neighbor, and announced across the aisle: “I am speaking to that other bearded man.”
He looked around. There was no other bearded man. I watched him through the corner of my eye. I gave him a second and then I raised my voice. “Give it up!”
I watched his pupils dilate.
“Give what up?” he asked desperately.
But I didn’t respond. I was through with him.
The plane got blasted by a series of strong winds. After a brief rush of adrenaline, I suddenly felt defeated, morose, sullen. The hunchbacked and uncertain piece of metal we were enclosed in was being propelled across the sky by a listless pilot. I calculated that it had a 50 percent chance of making it across the Atlantic Ocean. I reached down into my bag and retrieved my notebook. I petted its musty pages. I sniffed the leather binding. So what if the plane doesn’t make it? Why worry about it when we, like everyone who has died before us and who will die after us, will be buried in the indifferent landscapes of history; will turn to ash, residue, into poor fodder for someone else’s plants? I looked at the Renaissance man again. He was anxiously stroking his facial hair. I inhaled the dusty herb perfume of his beard. He looked pale. The blood had drained from his face. His pupils were still dilated.