Polar Vortex, page 2
At least I thought the woman spoke in Cantonese. Maybe Mandarin?
Lilly watched the girls with fascination. She’d started Kindergarten and loved it. It was the main reason to go, plus I really needed to get back to work—or try to. My efforts at writing had hit a wall. The frustration was mounting.
Sweat dripped down my back not even ten seconds after getting out of the car—the air stifling hot, thick with humidity and fumes I tasted in the back of my throat.
Early October and the fall season would be in full swing back in New York. I couldn’t wait to feel the cool outdoor air. A little morning frost out on Long Island would be welcome.
“Mitch, I can’t believe you left her inhaler at the restaurant,” Emma said. She inspected our daughter.
“I’m fine, Momma, don’t worry,” Lilly said.
“We still have one.” I took a blue plastic puffer from my hip pocket and held it up. I opened the trunk of the taxi with my other hand.
A passing car’s side mirror whipped by so fast and close I felt the wind suck forward the hairs on my left arm. I almost gave the driver the finger before realizing Lilly was looking at me.
“That one is almost empty,” Emma said. “You’re always so distracted.”
“Me?” I hauled my suitcase from the trunk. Why the hell wasn’t the driver coming back to help? “I wanted to be here for eight-thirty and it’s almost ten. Our flight leaves in barely more than an hour. If we don’t get our bags on soon, we won’t be boarding. And who knows how long the lineup is.”
I hated being late.
Whenever I had to get somewhere, my mind automatically counted backward from the departure point to destination. Five minutes to get out of the car and to the counter. Ten to park. Seven minutes to walk downstairs. Eighteen for the drive. A carefully calculated tally of when and where with estimates and error limits.
My mind was forever adding up and counting. Estimating. I couldn’t stop it.
This morning was supposed to be twenty-four minutes on the Airport Express to HKIA, ten minutes downstairs to the taxi, five to the station, five from the station to ticket counter. Fifty minutes travel time—with maximum error—so if we’d left at 7:40 a.m., Lilly and I would have been here for eight-thirty and have more than enough time for bag drop and security.
But no.
My wife decided she needed to come with us. To see us off. Last minute.
Emma was many things, but on time wasn’t one of them. When I said we had to leave at seven-forty, for her that meant when she needed to get her makeup on. Why did she need makeup to go to the airport? She fussed around the hotel room for another half hour, and then decided it might be faster to take a taxi all the way there instead of using the airport train.
We got stuck in traffic behind a Golden Week parade down Nathan Road.
It was a Friday morning at the end of a national week off, and where she had figured the roads would be empty, the highway past Kowloon was jammed, even the entrance to the airport slowed to a crawl. I’d watched the misty green hills of Lantau Island creep past our taxi window inch by inch, and decided it wasn’t fog but pollution shrouding the peaks.
Chek Lap Kok, Hong Kong’s airport, was the busiest freight terminal on the planet and Terminal One was once the largest in the world. All of it built on an artificial island from dredged-up dirt reclaimed from the sea floor.
I’d been looking forward to wandering around it a bit. Usually this stuff fascinated the wannabe-engineer in me. Not today.
“Can you maybe help me?” I had three bags slung around my neck and was trying to maneuver Lilly’s suitcase from the back of the taxi.
By the time Emma got to her feet, I’d already gotten everything to the curb. I didn’t really need help. I was being snippy.
The taxi pulled away. “Hey, hey!” I hadn’t even paid him yet. Was this guy an idiot?
“It’s an Uber, remember?” Emma put a hand on my arm. She knew what I was thinking before I did. “Calm down. It’s already paid.”
I watched the taxi pull into the stream of traffic.
“Calm down,” my wife repeated. She took Lilly’s hand and with her other hand extended the handle on my wheelie suitcase. “And it’s nine-thirty-five. Not ten. We have half an hour for bag drop.”
We wound our way a hundred feet down the cement walkway to the indigo entrance posts marked, Allied Airways, in block yellow letters.
Halfway there, a woman sprinted ten feet from the curb to grab a bubble-wrapped cylinder from the hands of a red-capped porter. “No, no, ne touchez pas—don’t touch that.”
The woman took the package and inspected it. She stood straight in front of us and blocked our way forward. Blue surgical scrubs under a white lab coat, her nose freckled under a mound of cascading red hair that obscured her face.
“Sorry,” she said as she got out of our way. She smiled at Lilly and then at me.
“That lady was loud.” Lilly giggled.
Air-conditioned coolness swept over us as the terminal doors opened, the relief palpable as the chill stung my sweat-soaked neck. Cathedral ceilings arched high overhead in triangular white metal sheets, held aloft by forty-foot pylons at hundred foot intervals. Each second row of ceiling tiles was skylights, with sunlight streaming down. Low forests of divider-taped stanchions sectioned off the polished marble floor. Digital displays with block yellow characters gave directions.
Mercifully, everything was in Chinese and English. When traveling I felt like speaking English as a mother tongue was cheating, since we didn’t need to understand anyone else’s language to get around. If not cheating, then lazy.
“This way.”
I pointed at the display indicating Allied Airways and hurried us along, but Emma had been right. Still twenty minutes to ten. Plenty of time before the cut off, and rounding a corner I saw that there were only a dozen or so people at the Allied counter.
“It’ll be fine,” I said to Emma as I slowed my pace.
“She’s wheezing again,” Emma whispered back.
“It’s sixteen hours. If this one runs out, I’ll get another inhaler in New York when we land. At Walgreens on the corner. We’ll get there this afternoon. Amazing.”
And it was amazing.
We took off at 11 a.m. from Hong Kong and landed at 3 p.m. the same day in New York, literally halfway around the world. Not a four-hour flight, but sixteen hours with a twelve-hour time difference folded in.
Kowloon and Brooklyn traded day for night exactly, so while it was ten in the morning here, it was ten at night the previous day in Manhattan.
The flight took us straight north, up over China into Russia, past the North Pole to drop down over Canada and home. Santa’s shortcut, they called it.
An adventure.
My wife wanted to go on holiday adventures, like hiking some mountain, but I wasn’t an intrepid traveler. Here, however, was an exploit I could enjoy from the comfort of a padded chair with a glass of Chardonnay in hand.
Emma’s phone beeped. She took it from her pocket. “Josh says he’ll meet you on the plane. Some kind of emergency. I texted him to say I wasn’t coming with you.”
“Not too much of an emergency? He’s flying today?”
She nodded. “Said he left us a gift at the counter.“
“Gift?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Uncle Josh is coming to take us onto the ahh-plane?” Lilly asked. She hadn’t quite mastered vowels, or maybe had inherited some of my Long Island accent.
“We’re going to meet him on the plane. Later.”
“Oh, okay.” Lilly went back to counting tiles in the floor as we walked.
I had to admit, I was excited.
It wasn’t every day that you got to fly over the top of the world. I started a book about Robert Peary’s expedition to conquer the North Pole over a hundred years back. So far I had only made it through the first two chapters, but planned to finish it on the flight as I crossed the same frozen landscape he and his men had toiled across.
At the entrance to the ticket counter, a barrel-chested man in a Gucci-looking business suit argued with a younger man in a frayed khaki army jacket. The older man had a manicured beard as close-cropped as the hair on his head.
The younger one’s beard was bushy and wild, the sides of his head shaved but with a long mop of hair on top pulled back into a ponytail. Homeless Viking came to mind.
The younger man’s face was blushed red.
We stopped behind a stocky man in a denim jacket, with a nice blue knit tie and white shirt buttoned up. I noticed his tortoise shell eyeglass frames. Those looked expensive. My mind kept categorizing and calculating things about people around me.
Beside him, in the First Class line, was a father and son, the man a six-and-a-half foot, three-hundred-pound-plus flat-faced Chinese man. His son—I assumed it was his son—was a small chubby-faced boy with tan-colored skin and bright brown eyes.
The boy saw Lilly and smiled. My daughter smiled a shy grin back and hid behind her mother’s skirt.
Emma pulled at my arm. “Look at this.” She had her phone out and held it up.
UK Must Boost Arctic Defenses, ran the BBC article headline. MP‘s warn against increasing threat in the far north and the disproportionate military expansion by Russia and its aggressive and revisionist behavior.
A linked article described Russian bombers flying over disputed Alaskan territory.
My wife whispered in my ear. “I’ve got a bad feeling.”
“About what?”
“This flight.”
“You don’t want us to go?”
She remained silent.
“Are you serious?”
“I don’t know.”
“You always get nervous in airports.”
“I know. But still…”
“Seriously. I’m sure we could rebook and stay. Talk to Lilly’s school and tell them.”
My wife shook her head. “It’ll be easier if it’s just me here with my mom and dad.”
“You’re sure?” I asked, but I could see she wasn’t. She was doing her thing again, trying to rationalize away irrational thinking.
To change the topic I said, “Are you going to tell them?”
“Not until the end of the first trimester.”
“Tell them what?” Lilly asked, her face upturned to us both.
“That you have a little brother or sister coming.”
My wife shushed me but then rolled her eyes realizing the cat in the hat had escaped the bag.
Lilly’s eyes went wide. “Weally?”
“But it’s a secret,” I said, putting a finger to my lips. “Shhhh…”
“Shhhh…” Lilly mimed.
“Excuse me, m̀hgòi, excuse me,” someone growled in a thick Russian accent.
It was the barrel-chested businessman with the almost-shaved head. His cuff links flashed as he muscled past us, an oil slick of expensive-smelling cologne seeping into the air in his wake.
“Hey, buddy—” I started to say, but Emma held my arm.
Calm down, her grip implored.
The man glanced at me but didn’t reply as he pushed through the rest of the people. Seeing the counters full he detoured straight to the First Class sign. What an asshole.
A few minutes later and there was one guy left in front of us in line.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Lilly said in a small voice. She crossed her legs.
“You’re going to have to wait,” I said. “A few minutes, sweetie.”
“You can go ahead of me.” The man in the tortoise shell eyeglasses had turned and held out one hand to offer to let us past. “I’m not in a hurry. Please, go ahead.”
“Thank you.” I admired his knit tie and jean jacket. Cool look for a middle-aged guy.
I advanced to an open counter while Emma brought up Lilly and the bags, and was about to hand over our passports when the fresh-faced woman with a red kerchief around her neck said, “Ah, you must be Mr. Matthews.”
“Ah, yeah, um, that’s right. Mitch Matthews.” Perplexed at how she knew my name, I held out the passports.
“The Captain was down earlier and showed us a picture of you and your lovely daughter,” the woman explained, recognizing my confusion. “And I’m very happy to tell you that you’ve both been upgraded to First Class.”
“First Class?”
“That’s right.”
“Like with the lie-flat beds?”
“And a nice selection of wines from our sommelier.” The woman began tapping on her computer.
I turned to Emma. “First Class.”
The prospect of sixteen hours in cramped seats had suddenly changed into a pleasure cruise.
Emma wasn’t as impressed. “You make sure Lilly stays strapped in.”
“Of course.”
“I love you, Mitch.”
“I love you, too.”
“You take care of Lilly. You hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“No matter what, you take care of our little girl.”
CHAPTER 3
WE ENTERED THE First Class Lounge past a bonsai garden by the frosted glass-wall entrance and a gauntlet of smiling gatekeepers. Straight away we went to see the food.
A team of busy chefs worked preparing plates for a buzzing hive of waiters. We picked some seats and deposited our jackets beside a woman in a crisp business suit who sat in a deep brown leather chair with a view onto the green hills of Lantau Island in the distance.
“Can I eat any of them?” Lilly asked.
She pointed at a selection of fine pastries on a refrigerated tray. A white-smocked-and-hatted dessert chef worked on what looked like…rum babas? Small brown cakes oozing stickiness, each topped with a puff of whipped cream.
“Take one for now,” I said. “Pick whichever looks nicest.”
So this was how the other half lived. Or the other one percent. Or one-hundredth of one percent. I made a mental note of details to write in my journal.
I eyed the wide horseshoe-shaped bar behind us but decided alcohol wasn’t a good idea, at least until we got onto the plane. Take care of her. I heard my wife’s words from a few minutes ago when we’d said our goodbyes. Trust me, I’d said.
“Come on, sweetheart,” I said to Lilly. “Let’s sit down. We’ve got a half hour.”
▼▲▼
“Authorities are now working with local police to protect the city,” the newscaster on the TV said.
He had a British accent, and looked the part with a stylishly unkempt mess of hair and breast pocket handkerchief in his suit. I’d tuned the lounge’s TV into the only English-language news broadcast, VuiTVsix.
They were talking about the recent protest marches for Hong Kong independence. Of course, they were portraying the protesters as a danger. This was state-controlled media. Then again, I had little more faith in our sensationalized news channels back home.
What was the difference?
“Hey, Mitch, how’s it going?”
My wife’s half-brother stood grinning over me. A full head of perfectly casually coiffed hair, salt-and-pepper gray, with a protruding square jaw. A poster child for pilots if there ever was one. He had on his Allied uniform—a deep navy blue jacket and trousers and polished black shoes, with the obligatory brass wings over his left breast.
I stood to shake his hand. “Hey,” I said around a half-mouthful of prosciutto. “Thanks for the upgrade.”
“Call it luck, I guess. My boss asked me if I wanted this flight last minute.”
In the eight years I’d been married to Emma, I’d only met Josh three times before. Once at our wedding when he came alone, and two other times when he’d stopped in on legs through New York. He and his family lived on the West Coast—or had lived. I wasn’t sure what his situation was now.
I watched his eyes. Blue-green and flecked with hazel. Clear. Not bloodshot. Stupid, I thought, but Emma had made me promise to look carefully.
“I was thinking, maybe you want to stop in at our place? You must get a few days layover?”
“That’s awfully nice, but—”
“Come on. Lilly would love it. We could grab a few beers. Let me repay you for the upgrade?”
I noticed his eyes kept looking over my shoulder. I stole a glance. Ah.
“Yeah, you know,” he said. “Back out on the prowl.”
He’d noticed the redhead who had almost run into us on the sidewalk. Very attractive in an exotic sort of way. Not American, I guessed. She’d changed into street clothes, traded the lab coat for yoga pants. Nice legs.
She was cradling that package from outside like an infant in her arms.
In the lounger behind her, the jackass with the fancy cufflinks stared—slack jawed—into the distance. His homeless-Viking-looking friend was nowhere to be seen.
“And who’s this beautiful lady?” Josh knelt, his face taking on a mock-quizzical look.
Lilly hung back by my leg and hid her face behind her hands. “I’m Lilly,” she said finally.
“You can’t be Lilly. Last time I saw her, she was no bigger than a peanut.”
My daughter giggled. “I’m no peanut.”
“Now you’re a big nut.” He ruffled her hair and stood.
Salutations finished, Lilly ran off in pursuit of the chubby-cheeked boy again. The same one we’d seen in the lineup outside.
“Conditions in Tibet are worsening as local rebels refuse to recognize the new Dalai Lama,” the news anchor said in the background. “Authorities are now searching for monks who claim—”
“How are you doing?” I said to Josh.
His smile slid away. “What did you say to Emma?”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
I made sure Lilly was out of earshot before replying. “I didn’t say anything.”
As a pause became awkward I added, “Don’t blame me.”
He remained aggressively silent.
I said, “Are you being serious?”
“Like I was the only one talking to those girls.”
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