“Come on, I said I was sorry.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Iris sighs.
“Next time, I promise, but I’ve gotta go now— I have a two o’clock flight and it’s… fuck, it’s one.”
“Yeah,” Iris says again, “yeah.”
They hang up and Iris orders chicken tacos at the counter. She has lost count of the number of times Neil has stood her up like this. She tries not to think of things she might have done to deserve it, and instead remembers the last time they managed to get together, several months ago, at a Chinese buffet by the airport that he said had served as the backdrop in some old action movie. She’d been in a remembering mood.
“Do you remember when we used to go sledding?” she asked, fiddling with the sticky lid on the soy sauce.
“Used to? When?” he said, sawing at a strip of beef with a plastic knife and fork.
“A bunch of times. You were there. Don’t you remember how Sebastian used to sink in the snow? In that weird little parka Mom made for him?”
“When did we ever have snow?”
“We would drive up to the mountains. We would drive around and around until we found a perfect hill, without too many trees or bushes or anything, because Mom was worried we’d impale ourselves.” She tried to meet his gaze, but he never looked up from his plate.
“You sure you’re not remembering some movie, about some other kids who went sledding? I mean— what mountains, even?” Neil said, then coughed into his napkin and took a sip of soda.
Iris murmured, more to herself than to him, “It was when we lived at that old house, with the horses. There were mountains, not too far anyway…”
Neil gave an exaggerated shrug with his fork in one hand and soda in the other.
“It was so much fun. You had fun…” she started, but lost momentum. She cracked open her fortune cookie, her meal only half eaten. A man without aim is like a clock without hands, as useless if it turns as if it stands, the fortune said, and she flicked it onto her plate.
“What are you getting all quiet about?” he continued, wiping a fallen drop of sriracha off his hand with a napkin. “It doesn’t make any difference one way or another.”
“I just like it when you and I can both remember things.”
“I remember plenty of stuff,” he said, wiping at a spot on the table now, “try me.”
“Never mind,” she said, and ate the cookie.
They call her number and Iris goes up to get her tacos, but it’s taken so long that her lunch break is over, and she has to take it to go in a Styrofoam box.
As she walks out into the parking lot— five minutes late and counting— she has a sudden memory of playing Go Fish with Neil in their parents’ car as it gingerly hugged the mountainside, all their belongings crammed in the trunk and strapped to the roof. All the blankets and pillows were stuffed under their legs, so they were cushioned, their knees up by their chins. The cards were laid on top of a large picture book precariously balanced on the sleeping dog’s back. Their parents were listening to Lake Woebegone on tape, an invisible screen between the front and backseats.
“Got any sevens?” her brother asked, absently chewing on his bottom lip.
“Go fish,” she replied, though she found the seven of clubs among her cards as soon as she said it. She decided not to correct herself, and stroked the underside of Sebastian’s neck with deliberate nonchalance.
Then the car stopped short and cards flew everywhere— on the floor, in their mother’s lap, in a firework spray. The book slipped off Sebastian’s back as he rose to his haunches, barking angrily, insistently. Iris quickly pulled her hand away from him. Their father put the hazards on while he consulted the map. Iris and her brother turned to look at each other behind the dog’s tense, heaving back, all symmetry, as their mother turned around in her seat and softly murmured, “Sebastian, be reasonable,” then turned back around, whispering anxiously about something Iris couldn’t make out.
As she pulls out of her spot, she imagines Neil driving away, waving back to her through the sunroof, only the tips of his casually flapping fingers visible out the top, like they would be, if he’d shown up. She can always picture him leaving, whether she wants to or not.
ASCENT
Neil hangs up, throws the phone back in his briefcase and leans his seat back the inch or two he’s allowed. He could have told her earlier that he wasn’t going to make it to lunch, that he was going to try to get an earlier flight, but he thought it kinder to appear as though he had tried, had done everything in his power to bend his schedule for her. But the prospect of rushing across town, speeding back to the airport just in time for the sake of another half-hour of high sodium and strained conversation— it was too exhausting, all of it.
He looks out his small window at the tarmac. They’ve been sitting on the plane now for over forty minutes with no sign of imminent movement— negating the point of the early flight altogether— and he feels pins and needles rushing through every inch of his body, an impotent fury at this halted momentum. His iPod’s dead, but even if it weren’t, he’s sick of everything on it, pressing skip, skip, skip, because the song titles just telegraph the whole song he’s heard seven hundred times so he doesn’t need to listen to it, so he skips, and skips. There’s nothing to read. Before boarding he browsed the newsstand, thought about buying a paper and then didn’t. He tried flipping through the airline’s magazine, lingering over a top ten list of must-visit burger joints in America, none of which he’d ever been to or probably ever would, but after a few pages, he couldn’t shake the feeling that even the articles were ads, even the gloss of the pages against his fingers and the act of turning them was trying to tell him what he should be doing, and what he needed and didn’t have.
He realizes he’s giving a monologue in his head again and he wants to stop. So he stares out at the black, wet tarmac, and the drizzle dotting the bright yellow windbreaker of a baggage handler as he motors past on a cart leaden with identical black rolling suitcases.
God what a shitty job, he thinks. He turns away from the window and looks around the cabin. Everyone seems to be fidgeting with bags, straps, seatbelts, their hands grasping at things. Even the flight attendants— they’re reaching, switching, grabbing. They all know what they’re doing, but he can’t imagine what all the fussing and mussing is for. It smells like the flu in here, this eighties upholstery, the groaning gray plastic cart stacked with sodas that he can just see parked at the other end of the aisle, sodas that taste like old bubble gum and sit in his stomach like an inflated balloon, and greasy little bags of nuts, and there are thousands upon thousands of them, a constantly replenished supply of bullshit to occupy the hands and jaws, and he’ll probably just fucking eat them and drink them because what else is he going to do and then what?
Then they’ll finally take off, and after the initial ascent, for those few moments when his ears are popped, and all he hears is the interior of his skull, and his organs feel suspended away from the walls of his body, he’ll look out the window at the rushing cloud wall and briefly experience that singular joy of flight, and remember all over again that he, and his body, are alive.
SMOKE
Back at the office, with her boss gone, the day takes on a looseness that Iris doesn’t quite know what to do with. Occasionally, she will hear footsteps in the hallway, outside, people passing to and from the restrooms, in and out of offices she has never seen. How do they arrange their furniture? Who sits behind their front desks? She knows there are people in her own office, behind more doors. But she can’t say she feels their presence. Every now and then, the phone will ring and she will answer.