ONE
In the morning, I received a phone call and was told to board a flight. The arrangements had been made on my behalf. I packed no clothes, because my clothes had been packed for me. A car arrived to pick me up. The radio announced traffic due to an accident involving a taxicab driver, a police officer, and a woman whose occupation the dispatcher did not specify. But there was no traffic. My ticket was in the breast pocket of my jacket, which was handed to me as I exited the passenger door. Waiting in line, I felt I had no body, but by the time I reached security, I was hungry. Inside my carry-on, I found two apples and a croissant, which tasted like nothing. The security agent asked me for my name. I gave him my driver’s license, walked through the metal detector, and then my body went away.
Before takeoff, a flight attendant announced our destination. Everyone cheered. The passenger to my right asked if I was happy to be going home. He didn’t speak our destination’s national language, which had become the language of the plane. I told him that I was neither happy nor unhappy. He said he understood where I was coming from, because his work had introduced him to people like me. He said that people like me had changed his life. It was true that they needed money, but the fact that he gave it to them had nothing to do with what they meant to him.
His real life, outside of our destination, was complicated by ambivalence. Since childhood, his basic needs had been met as if by an invisible force. At first, he believed his mother and father were providing for him, but when they died, he was surprised to feel he had suffered no loss. Care, he realized, didn’t originate within his parents, whose protection remained palpable in almost everyone he encountered: waitstaff, his internist, even the prime minister. It had merely taken up residence in their bodies, which he didn’t need to visit, because the cemetery had nothing to do with the rest of his life.
He looked cautious when he mentioned that word, “cemetery,” as if he had accidentally said a slur. When he was done worrying about being offensive, he moved on to talking about his wife. Things had come to her easily. As soon as they got married, she wanted children, and then she gave birth to two. She considered recipes to be extraneous. Instead, she ordered cooking magazines, and then reproduced the food on the cover page from sight. He had no use for leftovers, because his office provided a catered lunch. Everyone he worked with had been elevated to the status of a boss. They made a lot of money but weren’t fond of discussing it, especially not with people like me. He appreciated the fact that people like me didn’t have desires. His desires felt paralyzing because they weren’t motivated by need. Everything was available to be possessed, which made it impossible to quantify an object or person’s relative allure. He wished he felt more lust for his mistress. I tried to relate to him and understand his concerns.
After takeoff, I unbuckled my seat belt. A flight attendant asked if I preferred coffee or tea. I thought about it but didn’t think I had a preference. She tried another language. When she said it like that, I realized I preferred coffee. The man to my right asked for sugar, and the flight attendant asked if I wanted sugar, too. I said no, and then she switched languages again and gave me sugar anyway. The coffee was delicious. The man to my right spit it out.
Behind me, an elderly woman was coughing. When her body gave her a break from that, she told the flight attendant her life story. As a young girl, she said, she had been very beautiful. When she was six, her classmate fell in love with her. He wrote her letters every day. One day, one of his letters was confiscated by the school principal, who loved her, too. To humiliate the classmate, the principal read the letter aloud. Everyone laughed, and the classmate never came to school again. Instead, he got very good at shooting guns. He realized that if he approached someone with a gun, even if it wasn’t loaded, he could get them to give him anything. When he turned sixteen, he fell in love with his servant. He wanted to marry her, but she got pregnant by the other servant. A few days before the birth, he saw the other servant chopping wood. His aim was really good at that point. When the other servant raised the axe above his head, the elderly woman’s classmate fired a shot between his legs and permanently damaged the other servant’s penis. Everyone in the town was sad about that, but the elderly woman’s classmate was rich, so they let him live his life.
Years later, when he was an adult, he came across a prison guard sitting outside a prison. He told the prison guard to let the prisoners go. They were political prisoners. The prison guard said he didn’t want to let them go, because it was very important to the prevailing political party that the prisoners remain imprisoned. The elderly woman’s classmate pointed a gun at the prison guard’s head and told him to do it anyway. Unfortunately, the prison guard, who was not educated in politics, continued to refuse to set the political prisoners free. He got shot in the head. Once it was clear that he was fully dead, the political prisoners went free. Their political party, the opposition party, turned the elderly woman’s classmate into a political symbol. Then the prevailing political party hanged him. That was the end of the elderly woman’s story.
After an hour, the ocean was the size of my window. I looked at the other passengers. Everyone was asleep, except the man to my right, who was watching a film on a portable DVD player. On the screen, a strange man with a bald head was standing on a street corner. A woman with a stroller walked by and he asked her to stop. She didn’t want to stop. I think she was worried for her baby, who wasn’t on the screen but who was supposed to be in the stroller. The man said to hold on a minute. The man said he had a question for her, and her face became open. He said, Do you belong to anybody? She looked flattered. I think she thought the question was specific to her, but when she walked away, he just did the same thing to the next person, who wasn’t even a woman. The next person was a teenager riding a bike. He didn’t stop, so the bald man just yelled out the question. The teenager rode away, and no one else was around to hear. Everyone was ignoring the strange bald man. He started to look lonely, and then he walked to a movie theater. He sat there and watched a movie about people having sexual relations. When it was done, he decided to walk across the city in a straight line. It didn’t matter if there were obstacles. He got to a fence and climbed it, then jumped off on the other side. He got to a building and the security guard told him to show his credentials. He said, Do you belong to anybody? The security guard didn’t answer the question but let him go through. The strange bald man climbed up to the roof, walked onto the roof of the next building, and then he fell.
I didn’t think the movie was supposed to be over, but the DVD player announced that it was going to sleep. I looked at the man to my right. I was hoping he would do something to make it wake up. His eyes were open. I said, Excuse me? No answer. To be fair, I had watched his personal movie without permission. He might not have liked that.
I decided to close my eyes, and then I fell asleep. When I woke up, the flight attendant was asking the man to my right if he preferred chicken or fish. He didn’t say anything, which I could relate to, because I also didn’t have a preference. If the fish was fresh, I would have preferred that, but I assumed it had been previously frozen and then cooked in some kind of unidentifiable oil, so comparing it with the chicken, I had no preference. I was thinking about that when the flight attendant began to scream. I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. I thought she must be having a personal problem. I turned to the man on my right, wondering if he could understand what was happening with the flight attendant. His eyes were still open, and his head was slanted to an extreme degree.
The flight attendant switched languages and told me the man to my right was dead. Another flight attendant asked me if I knew the man’s name. I told her that I knew about his problems with his desires, but to please excuse me, for I had not thought to ask for that information.
They made an announcement and asked if there were any doctors on board. Unfortunately, there were none, so a third flight attendant arrived with a first aid kit. Inside, there were bandages and medicated creams: nothing to help a dead man. I wanted to ask to move to another seat but wasn’t sure that would be the right thing to do. I stayed sitting in my seat. The flight attendants wrapped the man’s body in blankets and put a pillowcase over his head. I didn’t think that was any way to treat a dead man, but I recognized that they had no other option, just as I had no other option but to accompany him to our destination. For the rest of the flight, I couldn’t do anything but think about my life.
The flight attendants resumed their meal service. They didn’t ask for anyone’s preference, they just gave away whatever they had, and no one complained. For me, they provided both options: chicken and fish. I think the flight attendants felt that food was the only consolation they could give me. I pretended to eat it but really I just moved the food around the different compartments of the tray and then transferred it to a plastic bag so I could throw it away later. I wasn’t sure how it would look to arrive at my destination with trash, but I figured it was better than the alternative of offending the people in front of me.
I went back to thinking about my life. While I was thinking about that, a young man with very straight teeth reached over the dead man and tapped me on the shoulder. It was the pilot. He told me that once we landed, I would be given a voucher that would allow me to fly anywhere in the world that I wanted. In my head, I thought, I have no desire to get on a plane ever again. I said thank you, thinking that it was strange that he should leave the cockpit in order to give a gift to a stranger who had watched a movie, part of a movie, with a dead man.
When we landed, everyone clapped because they hadn’t died. I was basically sure I hadn’t died but didn’t think it would be right for me to clap at a dead man’s funeral. Unfortunately, because I was sitting next to the dead man, I had no choice but to be the final passenger to exit the plane. I wanted to look out the window, but the line to the exit had become a procession, and everyone wanted to stop to tell me they were sorry. I’m so sorry, said a man with a backpack. I couldn’t tell him apart from the dead man and was disturbed by that, so I looked at the next person, a woman, who said she was so sorry, too. The next man said sorry in a different language, and when he looked at me, he seemed like he was going to cry. I wondered if I knew him. I didn’t like that possibility, so I said thank you and waited for the next. I continued like that forever, at least a few minutes. I wanted to look out the window but had no choice. Outside was the country I had left twenty-six years prior, my brother, family, and everyone. And yet I had no choice but to sit and receive condolences for this dead stranger with a pillowcase on his head, who had entered my life only today, and whom I was now bound to think about so long as I lived.
Anyway, the experience was over. A group of airport workers came with a stretcher and wheeled the dead man away. I hoped he would find a doctor but had no idea what a doctor could do. I assumed resuscitation was not an option, but I prayed for that anyway.
Copyright © 2023 by Maya Binyam