Allan Stein. Matthew Stadler

       4

      The airport was torn up and confusing. I had my two bags and knapsack (only what can be carried), plus the passport, clutched in one hand with my ticket. I hadn’t slept well despite all the wine—excitement, I told myself, though approaching the airfield (the only passenger that hour in the ExPorter Express Van) it was clear that leaving also frightened me. This trip was a precipice and I was going over. Herbert, who is always nervous about airplanes, had given me some pills to take.

      It was difficult to find my terminal. Men with hydraulic tools blasted paint from the concrete floors. Flapping gray tarpaulins covered steel frames where the glass walls were missing. I asked directions, but noise from the tools drowned my voice out. Normally the gates are coded by color, but there was no color left. A woman touched my wrist. She looked at my ticket and motioned for me to follow her. Because of the noise we said nothing. This woman was kind but her face was hard and expressionless, like the floor. She set a brisk pace and only looked back to see that I kept up. Wooden barriers and strung tape channeled us past the torn-open places. The sun through the tarps was dull and even. We found my gate and it was crowded, so I had to stand. The woman nodded at it, then left me.

      Everything about my flight had been changed. The airplane would leave late and fly to Paris directly because of heavy snow in the north. Danes argued reasonably at the ticket desk. I was in business class, which meant I could board early. In my knapsack (all I had after the gatekeeper snatched my suitcases away) were Émile, Walks in Gertrude Stein’s Paris, some Henry James, A Very Pretty Girl from the Country, Paris As It Is, old guidebooks from Herbert—Ward-Lock & Co.’s Paris (1911), C. B. Black’s Riviera (1905; how very intriguing to see what has changed, he said)—and Zigzagging in France, all unearthed from the bulky suitcase when it was taken from me, panicky and convinced I would read at least six books on the flight over (I read none of them).

      Because I boarded first, the magazines were still available. I picked out a half dozen and stuffed them in the netting of the seat in front of me. Cool air blew through a nozzle and over my face. I sank into the cushions and watched men outside groom the metal wings. Luggage dragged on belts dropped into the plane’s belly, then bumped and settled in the hold like ice into a glass. There were engines humming, small engines that soothed my nerves. It might have been the pills.

      I rode the airplane as if into sleep, motionless, transported. The ground fell away, and the air inside became thick and busy. The city, my home, rushed away, beyond my reach. Through the scarred plastic window unreal tableaux lurched and turned, then disappeared into clouds. I drank a lot of alcohol and could not stay awake. The flight was very long. It felt like days with meals that came suddenly and too soon. Dinner arrived during a prolonged morning that seemed to be moving backward into night. We had a snack and breakfast in the middle of a dream, then a second morning. The night between was caricatured and flat, an emblem of night that fell and withdrew as suddenly as the backdrop of an opera. The sun appeared, a dull metal disk on an empty curved horizon that was stained yellow and blue by the sun’s arrival. A woman across from me said good morning. She took her breakfast from the steward and thanked him. There is an easy camaraderie in business class. In coach I would not speak to anyone.