Tiffany said: “That is so-gross.”
Cheryl said: “And uses my pillows?”
Two more non-Lithuanians, a pair of Belgians, joined the line behind Chip. Simply not to be the last in line brought some relief. Chip, in French, asked the Belgians to watch his bag and hold his place. He went to the men’s room, locked himself in a stall, and counted the money Gitanas had given him.
It was $29,250.
It upset him somehow. It made him afraid.
A voice on a bathroom speaker announced, in Lithuanian and then Russian and then English, that LOT Polish Airlines Flight #331 from Warsaw had been canceled.
Chip put twenty hundreds in his T-shirt pocket, twenty hundreds in his left boot, and returned the rest of the money to the envelope, which he hid inside his T-shirt, against his belly. He wished that Gitanas hadn’t given him the money. Without money, he’d had a good reason to stay in Vilnius. Now that he had no good reason, a simple fact which the previous twelve weeks had kept hidden was stripped naked in the fecal, uric bathroom stall. The simple fact was that he was afraid to go home.
No man likes to see his cowardice as clearly as Chip could see his now. He was angry at the money and angry at Gitanas for giving it to him and angry at Lithuania for falling apart, but the fact remained that he was afraid to go home, and this was nobody’s fault but his.
He reclaimed his place in the Finnair line, which hadn’t moved at all. Airport speakers were announcing the cancellation of Flight #1048 from Helsinki. A collective groan went up, and bodies surged forward, the head of the line blunting itself against the counter like a delta.
Cheryl and Tiffany kicked their bags forward. Chip kicked his bag forward. He felt returned to the world and he didn’t like it. A kind of hospital light, a light of seriousness and inescapability, fell on the girls and the baggage and the Finnair personnel in their uniforms. Chip had nowhere to hide. Everyone around him was reading a novel. He hadn’t read a novel in at least a year. The prospect frightened him nearly as much as the prospect of Christmas in St. Jude. He wanted to go out and hail a cab, but he suspected that Gitanas had already fled the city.
He stood in the hard light until the hour was 2:00 and then 2:30—early morning in St. Jude. While the Belgians watched his bag again, he waited in a different line and made a credit-card phone call.
Enid’s voice was slurred and tiny. “Wello?”
“Hi, Mom, it’s me.”
Her voice trebled instantly in pitch and volume. “Chip? Oh, Chip! Al, it’s Chip! It’s Chip! Chip, where are you?”
“I’m at the airport in Vilnius. I’m on my way home.”
“Oh, wonderful! Wonderful! Wonderful! Now, tell me, when do you get here?”
“I don’t have a ticket yet,” he said. “Things are sort of falling apart here. But tomorrow afternoon sometime. Wednesday at the latest.”
“Wonderful!”
He hadn’t been prepared for the joy in his mother’s voice. If he’d ever known that he could bring joy to another person, he’d long since forgotten it. He took care to steady his own voice and keep his word count low. He said that he would call again as soon as he was at a better airport.
“This is wonderful news,” Enid said. “I’m so happy!”
“OK, then, I’ll see you soon.”
Already the great Baltic winter night was shouldering in from the north. Veterans from the front of the Finnair line reported that the rest of the day’s flights were sold out and that at least one of these flights was likely to be canceled, but Chip hoped that by flashing a couple of hundreds he could secure those “bumping privileges” that he’d lampooned on lithuania.com. Failing that, he would buy somebody’s ticket for lots of cash.
Cheryl said: “Oh my God, Tiffany, the StairMaster is so-totally butt-building.”
Tiffany said: “Only if you, like, stick it out.”
Cheryl said: “Everybody sticks it out. You can’t help it. Your legs get tired.”
Tiffany said: “Duh! It’s a StairMaster! Your legs are supposed to get tired.”
Cheryl looked out a window and asked, with withering undergraduate disdain: “Excuse me, why is there a tank in the middle of the runway?”
A minute later the lights went out and the phones went dead.
ONE LAST CHRISTMAS
Down in the basement, at the eastern end of the Ping-Pong table, Alfred was unpacking a Maker’s Mark whiskey carton filled with Christmas-tree lights. He already had prescription drugs and an enema kit on the table. He had a sugar cookie freshly baked by Enid in a shape suggestive of a terrier but meant to be a reindeer. He had a Log Cabin syrup carton containing the large colored lights that he’d formerly hung on the outdoor yews. He had a pump-action shotgun in a zippered canvas case, and a box of twenty-gauge shells. He had rare clarity and the will to use it while it lasted.
A shadowy light of late afternoon was captive in the window wells. The furnace was cycling on often, the house leaking heat. Alfred’s red sweater hung on him in skewed folds and bulges, as if he were a log or a chair. His gray wool slacks were afflicted with stains that he had no choice but to tolerate, because the only other option was to take leave of his senses, and he wasn’t quite ready to do that.
Uppermost in the Maker’s Mark carton was a very long string of white Christmas lights coiled bulkily around a wand of cardboard. The string stank of mildew from the storeroom beneath the porch, and when he put the plug into an outlet he could see right away that all was not well. Most of the lights were burning brightly, but near the center of the spool was a patch of unlit bulbs — a substantia nigra deep inside the tangle. He unwound the spool with veering hands, paying the string out on the Ping-Pong table. At the very end of it was an unsightly stretch of dead bulbs.
He understood what modernity expected of him now. Modernity expected him to drive to a big discount store and replace the damaged string. But the discount stores were mobbed at this time of year; he’d be in line for twenty minutes. He didn’t mind waiting, but Enid wouldn’t let him drive the car now, and Enid did mind waiting. She was upstairs flogging herself through the home stretch of Christmas prep.
Much better, Alfred thought, to stay out of sight in the basement, to work with what he had. It offended his sense of proportion and economy to throw away a ninety-percent serviceable string of lights. It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value and, by extension, the value of individuals generally: to willfully designate as trash an object that you knew wasn’t trash.
Modernity expected this designation and Alfred resisted it.
Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to fix the lights. He didn’t understand how a stretch of fifteen bulbs could go dead. He examined the transition from light to darkness and saw no change in the wiring pattern between the last burning bulb and the first dead one. He couldn’t follow the three constituent wires through all their twists and braidings. The circuit was semiparallel in some complex way he didn’t see the point of.
In the old days, Christmas lights had come in short strings that were wired serially. If a single bulb burned out or even just loosened in its socket, the circuit was broken and the entire string went dark. One of the season’s rituals for Gary and Chip had been to tighten each little brass-footed bulb in a darkened string and then, if this didn’t work, to replace each bulb in turn until the dead culprit was found. (What joy the boys had taken in the resurrection of a string!) By the time Denise was old enough to help with the lights, the technology had advanced. The wiring was parallel, and the bulbs had snap-in plastic bases. A single faulty light didn’t affect the rest of the community but identified itself instantly for instant …