Eleven Twenty-Three, page 3
“Sweetheart, how can you be a ghost if you’re walking around and living there?” I ask.
“Believe me, Layne, it can be done. You of all people should know that.”
I turn away from the conversation and look out the window, my thoughts no longer capable of being communicated.
No one else sits in our row, so Tara and I are left with an extra seat between us. Not long after the doors are closed and everyone is half-asleep in their full and upright position, beautiful women with pale tan skin and well-pressed uniforms demonstrate how to operate the oxygen masks stored above our seats. Then they demonstrate how to use our cushion as a life raft when we crash into the Pacific. I stare out the window and listen as Tara whispers a useless story about her and her sister fighting at the last two family Christmas parties in a row. Very quickly it seems, the plane heads for the runway and the Chinese attendants sit down in foldout seats a few feet away from us. They buckle their safety belts. One of the moon-faced girls smiles wanly at me.
Soon there is roaring and build-up. The lights rush by outside the window, which is covered in little pellets of rain. Then they dim beneath me, and are quickly gone underneath a blanket of darkness.
Almost immediately, it is as if China doesn’t exist, that it never did for either of us.
Tara is quickly sprawled out on her two seats with her head burrowing into my chest, and I stare out into the clouds and wonder if things will be okay back at home. I think about my depressed wine-slogging mother and the pin-up girl my father was married to when he died. I think about Hajime and the security cameras strewn about his kitchen table. I think of Mitsuko, of her whisper soaking into my flesh and contaminating my blood.
I begin to fall asleep several times, but am always quickly reminded of the nightmare from the terminal. So instead I end up fighting to stay awake.
“You are my Sunshine,” Tara is cooing into my ear when we begin our descent into San Francisco. “You make me happy when skies are gray…”
“Jesus,” I manage, surveying the thin blanket draped over me and the restless movement of the passengers sitting around us. “Like, what time is it?”
“It’s about the same time as when we left, actually. They just said on the intercom that it’s 10:25 local time.”
“We’re going backwards,” I sigh.
“They also said that we’ll be landing in about twenty minutes. Did you sleep all through the flight, sweetie?”
I sit up in my seat and push the blanket off of me. I’m sweating around the neckline and on my arms. The black t-shirt I’m wearing is sticky against my skin.
“What?”
“I said: did you sleep all through the flight?”
“No,” I cough, and continue coughing. “While you were asleep they showed Curse of the Golden Flower and fed us Lad Na, which I thought was kind of weird since it’s Thai. Then I read about half of that zombie book by Stephen King. The movie was great, the Lad Na was okay, but Stephen King is an affront to the airport novel. I can’t wait to get home and read a real book from my shelf instead of the stray American paperbacks in the lounge at school.”
“I miss everything from back home,” she yawns. “Did you have a nice rest?”
“It must have been fine. I didn’t wake up screaming this time.”
“Is that what happened last time?”
“Something like that, yeah,” I say, suppressing a yawn of my own. “I guess I’m kind of glad to be going home too.”
“Good,” Tara nods, and we sit in trepidation as our flight makes its final descent into San Francisco on a Thursday night we already experienced in an airport in China. When our plane finally lands I ask Tara if this is reality, if I am awake, or if it’s yet another one of my pointless dreams.
11:08:12 PM
We make our way through San Francisco International in a weird somnambulistic trance. It’s not very crowded this late at night. The food court is empty save a couple of janitors chatting in Spanish while eating sandwiches. Most of the terminals are deserted and the vacant leather chairs seem to weep as we pass on our way to the connecting flight to Orlando.
“It’s too bad we’re not here for a few days,” Tara says. “I’d like to go back across the Golden Gate again.”
“After the last conversation the four of us had there a couple of years ago?” I ask incredulously. “I don’t think so.”
“It’s so dead in here,” she says, looking around.
“Maybe they’re all jumping off the Bridge.”
“They close the footpath at night,” she tells me, and I pause momentarily to imagine a lone faceless man, his eyes the fog of the Bay, his cheeks red with same-old tears and final tenacity, as he climbs over an ineffective barrier and proceeds toward the center of the Golden Gate in cold amorphous darkness—another forgotten dead man the authorities won’t be able to add to the bridge’s official scoreboard.
I sigh.
The first time we passed through this airport, things were different.
I had some small sense of hope and expectation for the first time since losing my job back in April. There were people everywhere; they nodded and waited patiently in the food court for an open table; the seats in the terminals were filled with travelers reading magazines and listening to their iPods; there was sound and osmotic waves of electricity coursing through us all.
Tonight, as Tara and I trudge toward the one final plane that will take us home again to see my mother, my friends, and my dead father’s body, the prophetic emptiness of the airport is stifling, almost terrifying.
“I wish the food court was still open,” Tara says. “I missed the Lad Na on the plane. Do you think they’ll serve us food on the last flight?”
“I doubt it, Sunshine. Maybe there will be something open near our terminal. It’s kind of unnerving in here, isn’t it?”
“God, I hate how long this ordeal is,” she sighs. “You know, it’s almost not even worth coming back at the end of the month.”
I glance over at her, at her tired eyes and puffy nighttime cheeks, at the disheveled sanguine hair and the collapsing bun she has it in and then at the black and pink mailbag she has strapped over her breasts and the wrinkled Interpol t-shirt and the constricting jeans she is wearing.
And with disturbing clarity I know everything that will happen between us before December 29, the day we are supposed to go back.
Once we are home and she settles in with her family and our collective friends and all the opportunities that she will have and I will not, Tara will bring up the marriage thing again. Minutes later, with mascara tears smeared down her cheeks like a ruined impressionist painting, Tara will storm out of the room. A couple of weeks after that, my three-year girlfriend will watch me with unspoken angry resolve as I board another flight back East. And we both will know that when my plane lands again sometime in late July, it will be over between us, and all of our future conversations will be spoken in a language of silent assumptions and great physical distance.
During this lucid moment in a half-deserted, murmuring airport, I have no doubt what kind of non-future my partner and I will soon face. What really troubles me is that I can’t make myself care as much as I know I should.
Just as we are about to pass one of the men’s bathrooms and I decide to excuse myself, Mr. Scott emerges, walking at a very brisk pace. We momentarily make eye contact and I smile a greeting. But when I see his cold blank expression and his obvious intentions, I realize that the man we spoke to only hours ago on the opposite side of the planet is now a total stranger.
“Hey,” Tara exclaims, just recognizing him, “long time no see—”
Mr. Scott passes within ten feet of us, heading in the opposite direction. He does not wave, nod, or even hesitate in his trek.
“Um…okay,” my girlfriend stammers. “Yeah, that’s fine. That’s cool.”
I stop and turn to watch him hurry away.
“Maybe something happened,” I suggest quietly. “Maybe something bad came up and he’s upset. Maybe he was drunk at the bar and doesn’t remember us.”
“Yeah, well maybe he’s just an asshole,” Tara says.
“That’s possible too, I suppose.”
And that is when I notice it.
Just as he rounds a corner and disappears, I see that the briefcase he had attached to his wrist back in Shanghai is now gone.
08:34:34 AM
Our plane arrives in a rainy, pensive Orlando sometime around 8:15 in the morning. We take the tram back into the baggage claim area, now teeming with Disney-venturing tourists wearing tacky sunny clothes and wielding seething vampire children on each arm.
We left some things behind at our apartment in Suzhou—not so much Tara but definitely me—and each of us have two suitcases apiece along with the shopping bag I carried onto the plane and the mailbag Tara has been wielding for almost twenty-four hours now. I left my CDs, about three dozen bootleg DVDs, our wok, the George Foreman grill, the bedding, the oil painting of Guilin, thirty or so knick-knacks worth about fifteen American dollars, some unnecessary clothes that make me look awkward, that cologne I never wear, and our subscription to the China Daily that will now pile up outside our front door for the next three weeks. Tara left a dreadful pink blouse, some leopard print panties with a small hole near the crotch, and two unflattering, saggy bras behind. She has nothing invested in returning.
After collecting our luggage we head outside into a gray, humid morning and wait for Hajime to pick us up. Tara and I smoke cigarettes that help us forget our hunger and the encroaching conversations we will have once we get back to Lilly’s End.
I wince and consider the prospect of having a total breakdown.
Florida—the nation’s awkward dangling appendage—is just a goddamned terrible place to return to. It always was. It rains almost incessantly and yet always seems to be in the midst of a mysterious drought of Ethiopian proportions. The only Chinese anyone knows involves a buffet line, and the only questions they know to ask us will concern edible cats and the One-Child Policy. The old people stagger about, reduced to zombies of the grocery store lines and early morning mall walks. This time of year, the beach is cold, the sand is damp and crystalline, and the sharks are out there waiting patiently should we ever choose to finally make our escape into the Atlantic. Here, I’m just another lecherous ex-teacher lucky enough to be omitted from the current sex offenders list.
Hajime shows up in his Vibe twenty-eight minutes later. He parks at the curb and jumps out of his car to greet us. This is the longest Hajime and I have been apart in the eleven years or so that I have known him, and he is taller now than I remember him being back in August. As usual, he is wearing one of his patented black t-shirts from the Disinformation catalogue and jeans with holes intentionally carved out at the knees. His sunglasses hide his eyes and accentuate his pale Japanese skin. That idiotic black jelly bracelet still encircles his right wrist. He’s grown a tiny goatee that I will convince him to shave before I return to China.
“If it isn’t the Sick Men of Asia themselves,” he bursts. “Give me a fucking hug, for god’s sake.”
He gives Tara a long squeeze coupled with a brittle kiss on the cheek, and then moves on to me. I wrap my arms around him and am relieved by his sudden arrival and unchanged histrionic demeanor.
“Thanks for picking us up,” I say, smelling the back of Hajime’s neck, his jet-black hair, his confident aura.
“No problem,” he says. “Sorry about your dad, man.”
“It’s not much of an issue. Pop your trunk, bro. Let’s get out of here.”
“No welcome-home kiss first?” Hajime asks me. “Your loss. Just push the meth supplies out of the way back there and you guys should have plenty of room.”
I glance back at him and raise my eyebrows.
“Kidding, bro. I live in the South but I’m not that Southern.”
Tara places her things in the trunk and pushes them over to save room for my duffel bag and the blue suitcase I bought just before we left four months ago. I grab my duffel and feel something hard just at the top of it. This is interesting, since all I threw in there were clothes and a few folders and some small knick-knacks for my mom and Hajime.
A flash: cold gray steel rubbing against wood; the clinking of a roulette wheel; sweat dripping down my forehead; misgivings; a psychic moment.
“Hey, Sunshine,” I say. “What did you pack into my black bag before we left? Your make-up case?”
“I didn’t pack anything in there,” she says. “My make-up is in the big suitcase. Why do you ask?”
“Hold on a minute,” I say. “I’ve got to check something.”
“Did you two let a terrorist borrow your bag for five minutes or something?” Hajime asks, having no idea. “Didn’t you two incorrigible Americans listen to the voice at the airport warning you not to do that?”
“Normally what you said would be funny,” I murmur, and hunch over at the curb and unzip my duffel. “But it’s not funny now…”
I peer inside just as the oxygen is sucked out of my body and Orlando momentarily ceases to exist.
“I’m not even sure how to deal with this one, guys,” I say, clenching my eyes shut.
Inside my bag, resting comfortably on the top of my dirty shirts and crusty jeans and wrinkled slacks and about thirty cheap postcards of the canals in Suzhou, is a black leather Schlesinger American Belting attaché case, four-and-a-half inches deep, eighteen-and-three-quarters by thirteen-and-one quarter inch in size. There’s a piano hinge in the back, nickel plating, and double combination locks. Emerging seamlessly from the handle plate of the case is a three-foot metal coil with an unlocked steel handcuff at the end.
I thought I was returning home early this Christmas for nothing more than one funeral, one uncomfortable dinner with my mother, and two or three long conversations with friends and family I didn’t want to have back in August and become nauseous with the thought of now. I considered the possibility of finally having to endure Tara’s climactic final break-up with me, and then the unavoidable drawn-out aftermath.
But it was not until now, in this moment outside a muggy gray airport, that I reach that place, a place of sadness and dread.
A place where I am afraid.
Document Two
“When every eleven twenty-three heralds mayhem under a veil of hellish smog, and every eulogy spawns a funeral at the precipice of the still point.”
Lilly’s End, Florida
Population at 11:00 AM EST on Friday, December 7, 2007: 4,181
“Outside the gates of Jerusalem we saw indeed no living object, heard no living sound, we found the same void, the same silence...As we should have expected before the entombed gates of Pompeii or Herculaneam a complete eternal silence reigns in the town, on the highways, in the country...the tomb of a whole people.”
- Alphonse de Lamartine, Le Voyage en Orient
“Where we are,
There’s daggers in men’s smiles; the nea’er in blood,
The nearer bloody.”
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth
“The only true dead are those who have been forgotten.”
- Old Jewish saying
[TIME UNDETERMINED]
I am afraid.
When I finally awake from a dreamless post-flight nap, I find that I have no idea where I am or what I’m doing or why I feel so sick with misgivings and regret that I came home. Reverse culture shock, maybe. One of our co-teachers warned me about the phenomenon, and told me that the first time he returned to England after having lived in Jinan for a year, his sudden ability at the airport to read the billboards and posters and understand everything the people around him were saying sent him into a panic, and he spent his entire first week back home hiding out in his old bedroom, terrified of everything familiar and absolutely certain that if he went outside, he would die and so would everyone else.
The room I’m in now is dark and Tara sleeps soundly next to me. She feels lifeless when I touch her and so I do not touch her anymore. Instead, I take in my surroundings. There are stuffed animals piled up around a baby rocking chair in one corner of the room. A jubilant, soft-looking yellow frog takes me in good-naturedly from behind two cute koalas and a monkey. There is a Cold War Kids poster to my left, and a corkboard full of photographs next to a small desk littered with old bills and Hallmark cards with inspirational Frost and Angelou quotes etched across pictures of promising roads and living forests. Outside of this room, I can hear a minor susurrus of squeaky laughter, Miranda’s suicide-inducing conversation, and the jabbering of someone on Hogan Knows Best. I sigh, realizing I must be in Tara’s house on Flint Street.
Since we left, Tara’s once-rich parents have managed to pay Tara’s third of the rent so that Tara’s roommates Julie and Miranda could keep the house and Tara and I would have a place to return to should Suzhou not work out as planned. I was already losing my apartment back in August when we signed our contracts with Soochow University, and everything I own is now packed away into a small storage room on the far north side of town or crammed into the trunk of my Honda Accord parked in Tara’s back yard.
Through the blinds and dusty lace curtains come thin floating lines of color from the traffic light outside. I spend some minutes depersonalizing myself, wishing I was the traffic light out there. I can see its changing red, green, and occasionally yellow glow draped across the bare white wall by the window. For one brief moment, as I lie in Tara’s bed and catch tinted glimpses of random friends’ faces on the corkboard whenever cars pass in the half-night, I want nothing more than to be just another traffic light standing sentinel to the approaching evening.
I stare at Tara’s naked back while rubbing at the dried film left on my penis from the sex earlier today. The tattoo on her shoulder, which is of a ferocious oriental dragon coiled around a serene fairy, troubles me, and I go back to staring at the green and yellow and red that paints the wall the color of dusk.
