“Really. We are royalty after all.” Astley rolls his eyes before I can get all upset. He stands up, offering me his hand, which is solid and clean. I take it and we stand there for a minute, just staring at each other, and then he slowly lets go of my hand. One finger, then another. “I shall tell you why I believe this on the plane, and perhaps it will help you feel more comfortable about your own change, all right?”
I nod. “All right.”
Stretching and gathering my carry-on, I watch the people mill about. The flight attendant has dandruff. Flakes fall as she scratches her hair. The little girl stops crying, her dad never seeming to notice. A woman with super-huge noise-reduction headphones reads a Glamour magazine. A man in a tie wearing a wedding band holds a John Grisham novel in one hand. They are all so innocent, so unaware that they are sitting here with pixies. They have no idea that the entire world could change if we fail. And I am glad that they don’t, since sometimes not knowing is so much safer, so much saner.
The woman puts down her magazine. I lean forward and ask, “Are you done with that? Would you mind if I read it on the plane?”
For a second she looks shocked, but then she says, “Of course not. It’s good and mindless.”
“That is exactly what I need,” I say, taking it from the seat. “Thank you.”
Astley and I sit next to each other. After we’re buckled, I start to pull the armrest down, but he stops me. “There’s a lot of metal in that.”
“But we took the pills.”
“It would be better to leave it up.” His voice holds an apology in it. It’s not an order; it’s a suggestion, so I nudge the armrest back up between the seats with my elbow.
“Better?”
“Much.” He smiles and hands me a little white airplane pillow and a deep blue blanket. “Thank you.”
People keep boarding, pushing their carry-ons in front of them or pulling them behind. A woman cradles a baby close to her body. A man expels some gas. Astley looks at me and presses his lips together, trying not to laugh. I cover my nose and mouth with my hand.
“There are a lot of people in a plane,” I whisper, “and a lot of smells.”
I touch the wall by my right. It’s plastic and it seems plain beige at first glance, but there are actually tiny little swirling circles on it. I wonder if I would have noticed that if I were still human. I wonder if everything is like that: if things just seem shallow and pale, but then if you stare closer, you can see the hidden aspects. Astley leans back in his chair, stretches his legs underneath the seat in front of him. His hair is darkish blond, but if you look closely there are red strands mixed in. They flash in the sun, the shades running from copper to strawberry blond. Looking away, I run my finger along the ridge by the oblong window. Some airport workers in orange vests and jumpsuits drive food trucks and scurry around. I wonder what they look like beneath their surfaces, what sort of lives they lead, if they have swirling circles in them as well.
Once everyone boards, the flight attendant checks that the cabin is ready for departure. She demonstrates how to buckle a seat belt (I can’t believe people don’t know how to do that), shows how our seat cushions are floatation devices, and explains how to use the oxygen masks if there is a sudden drop in cabin pressure. As she talks, Astley grows paler and paler. We taxi down the runway and he just keeps swallowing way more than a normal person would.
“Are you okay?”
“I am afraid of flying,” he admits, fidgeting in his seat. He keeps crossing and uncrossing his legs like a little antsy kid.
“Um, you do know you fly all the time.”
“But that is without the airplane.”
“Oh, flying on a plane is a totally normal fear. That’s called aerophobia, aviatophobia, aviophobia, or pteromechanophobia.”
He laughs. “What is one supposed to do when faced with aerophobia, aviatophobia, aviophobia, or pteromechanophobia?”
“Do not mock my excessive knowledge of phobias,” I kid and punch him in the arm. “I always think it’s good to name your fear, face it head-on, and you’re doing that. I mean, you’re in a plane-that’s facing your fear.”
His lips press together. I can literally see the tension running off him, like blasts of orange swirls. After a moment he says, “That does not make me feel better.”
“Give me your hand,” I say as we start taxiing, building up speed. He doesn’t ask why. He just gives it to me. It’s large and sweaty and clammy. I slide my fingers between his, clamp my other hand over it, and squeeze tightly. “Sometimes, when you are scared, it just helps knowing that someone else is here.”
The plane tilts upward as the nose pokes toward the sky and the front wheels leave the ground.
“You are right,” he says, his voice deep and serious. “It does.”
It isn’t until we’re safely cruising at the highest altitude that he stops shaking. I pretend like I haven’t noticed a thing and resist the urge to wipe the sweat off my hands when he finally lets go.
Once the flight attendant has poured us both some cranapple juice and given us our packets of cookies, Astley clears his throat and starts to tell me the story. I know right away that it’s the story he mentioned at the airport because his already formal voice gets even more regulated, more regal somehow.
“When I was twelve years of age, my father died. Someday, perhaps, you will tell me how your father died, if you like,” he begins. I guess until he says it like this I’ve never realized that we both have fathers who died. “But for now I will tell you my story.”
They’d taken a cruise ship, the Queen Mary 2, across the Atlantic to Spain, which seems romantic to me. Astley had been excited about the trip, about being able to hang out with his father for a while, without his mother.
“She was not…” He stumbles to find the right words, which is something he rarely does. “She was not like she is now. She loved my father deeply. She loved him more than anything else, more than clocks or jewels or me or herself.”
The trip had gone well. Neither became seasick. Nobody got on anyone’s nerves. Then they arrived in Spain and made their way overland to Madrid.
“We were in a train station. It was incredibly crowded. The earth seemed to shake. I was excited because I thought that was just the train coming closer. However, it was much more than that. My father cursed and took me by the arm, just above the elbow.” He touched his elbow as if remembering. His voice grew softer. “When I looked at him I realized that something was horribly wrong.
“The rumbling grew louder and it brought the smell of fire, burning bodies.
“Only a few moments before it reached us, people started screaming, running madly away from the tunnel and back up toward the stairs,” he said.
I remember seeing something about this on CNN. There were bombings, a terrorist attack. Almost two hundred people died.
“We were stuck in this massive wave of humanity. The heat coming from the tunnel was immense, and then came the cloud of fire. ‘Cloud’ is not the correct word truly. It was a massive rolling beast.”
Everything inside of me tightens up and I grab Astley’s hand again. He doesn’t seem to notice. “Couldn’t he fly?” I ask.
“No. He was one of the few kings who could not. He never taught me, which is probably part of the reason why I utterly fail at landing, but I digress.” He hauls in a huge breath as a starchy man in a suit unbuckles and heads to the restroom. “He saw what was coming and he grabbed me by the other arm; then he lifted me above his head and threw me. Instead of saving himself, he threw me, Zara. He threw me all the way up the stairs.”
His voice breaks with emotion, raw and jagged, an ache so huge and real that I cannot believe he is sharing it with me. I think about Nick and how he’s never trusted me enough to tell me about his parents.