Flight Recorder

by Lindsay Lennox

I.

There had been a delay in boarding the plane, which was now half an hour behind schedule.

She had been glad to check her bag at the gate but now, a half hour behind schedule, she wished she’d thought to pull a different book out of it first. A heavy paperback rested in the seat pocket but that was for work, and she could see now that work reading was all wrong for this flight. Knowing the flight was full, she’d waited anxiously to see who would eventually come to sit in the middle seat between her own window view and the almost equally desirable aisle seat. In the end a larger, older man made his way to the seat next to her. “Sorry, I’m kind of wide,” he’d said, situating himself in the seat. He was a considerate seatmate under the circumstances, pulling his arms in front of himself to avoid impinging on her space, but it was inevitable that their shoulders should touch almost constantly. She’d shifted as far toward the window as she could without being rude – after all, he was doing his best as he wrestled with his seat belt and his jacket. It was, probably, difficult to have an economy-basic budget but a premier emergency exit row body type. She herself was narrow but tall, leading to a different type of struggle in conforming her body to the seat with its low slung headrest, but at least it rarely bothered her seat mates.

The work-related paperback (which she saw now was a mistake, too large and too heavy both materially and conceptually for economy-basic; she should have brought an Agatha Christie novel) had been a backup, safely lodged in the seat pocket, more or less talismanic. She had planned to use the flight time to reflect, to set intentions, to generally get her head in order for the upcoming weekend. If the visit were to go badly, then not only would she have potentially undone all her good work with John, but she’d have to second guess every aspect of the trip.

Leaving the kids for the weekend with their other mom, where they’d play video games and eat junk food: not such a hardship on them maybe but would it be worth the expenditure of co-parenting capital that had been needed to make the trip happen at all? Traveling by air in a late-pandemic environment: worth the exposure? She’d dutifully wiped down her tray table and armrests with the disposable wipe offered during boarding; she’d shoved it back into its package and now it sat in her seat pocket, its acrid faux-citrus odor occasionally rising above the ambient mixture of airline coffee, someone’s onion-y breakfast sandwich, the general scents of people, just people, more than she’d shared space with for years now.

Traveling by air at all while home insurance premiums in her mountainous state had doubled this year because of the constant out-of-season wildfires that could no longer even be said to be out of season at this point, and the flight would still use the same amount of carbon and then spit it back out into the atmosphere whether she was on it or not but that logic was how we got here, basically, she reflected.

She leaned her head back against the seat rest, closing her eyes to try to concentrate, but the wide man was breathing and his breathing was as the breathing of the plane, incorporated into her environment alongside the deep vibration of the engine and the higher pitched whistling of her overhead vent. He breathed was fast and deep, and she oscillated between feeling her own breath speeding up by accidental mirroring, and worrying that maybe she was forgetting to breathe altogether and that was why he seemed to be breathing so fast. She snuck a look at his face, checking his color in case he was unwell and about to have a heart attack. He was drinking coffee and eating pretzels in a way that suggested he felt comfortable, or at least normal.

The weekend needed to go well. The weekend would be the first time she’d visited not on a work trip, even if one or two of the work trips had been slightly manufactured to create an opportunity to visit. She’d known him for almost twenty-one years – she could call it twenty but then it might sound like what most people meant when they said 20, which was something more like “oh, for the longest time, not sure exactly but much longer than a decade.” She remembered meeting him, could probably pinpoint the date if needed by going back thru her emails to find the start date of the internship program the summer before her final year of college.

There was no reason to be that specific, of course, she knew that.

The wide man’s breathing deepened and sped up, improbably. He looked like he was sleeping (his eyes were closed) but she had a vision of him grabbing at his chest and then slumping sideways. What if he slumped towards her, and there was no space to guide him to the floor – what if she was trapped underneath the wide heavy-breathing man as he thrashed? How long would it take for a flight attendant to see what was happening, and then to do something about it? Would she have to climb out over the seat in front of her?

The wide man shifted himself in his seat, his arm falling back to rest more fully against her shoulder for a moment before he tightened his hands where he held them on his lap. Her own arm was starting to fall asleep where it rested on her window-side armrest but she resisted shifting, hoping that somehow her seatmate would notice her stillness and understand her superior understanding of airplane etiquette. Not that she wanted him to feel guilty; she appreciated his awareness of his bear-like build, his efforts to contain his shoulders in his own airspace.

She wanted to lean her head against the window but worried that this might amount to a ceding of territory to her neighbor. But he’d been so polite and considerate so far that she decided it was an acceptable risk. She’d known John for twenty-one years almost, although not without interruption. There was perhaps close to a decade when they hadn’t been in touch, starting a few years after that internship and ending a few years before today, when she got a job that took her to his city occasionally and was amenable to semi-manufactured reasons for travel. The problem, or a problem, with air travel was that there were so many potential air emergencies and it was impossible to avoid what she sometimes thought of as Mittying: calmly but efficiently summoning the flight attendant to alert her to her seatmate who has just been taken ill (“thanks for paying attention, ma’am, you wouldn’t believe how oblivious most people on planes are”); taking charge of the people seated closest to her when a disturbance seemed to be erupting up front near the cockpit (her near neighbors gave every impression of being people who might lose their heads in a crisis, frankly); stepping in to help calm the toddler seated in the row behind her when the plane started to drop erratically and the oxygen masks came down, the little girl’s own mother panicking. Ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa, competent (if never really inscrutable) to the last.

There was less than an hour left on the flight, which meant less than an hour of perceiving every torso-moving heave at her left shoulder, but also less than an hour to arrange her way of being for the weekend. After the flight there would be baggage claim (she cursed herself for agreeing to gate check her bag), then a train into the city, then a walk or ride share to the apartment, but once she was off the plane she’d be responsible for herself once again and it would be too late to decide what she wanted from the weekend. “In transit” was one of her favorite modes of being, not when driving (although she liked the meditativeness of driving too) but when she had no jobs to do except to exist, patiently and without unduly bothering anyone else. In-transit thoughts seemed to her to be the most pure, devoid of immediate goal-directedness, with almost no decisions to be made in the near term. What she really wanted from the weekend was assurance that the weekend was possible, that visiting for several days without the peg of a conference or meeting to hang it on was a mutually desired reality.

She gave up on the window headrest, which was making her neck ache in a way that used to go away by itself after a flight but she knew would now just be absorbed into her body’s ocean of physical discomforts, none of them acute enough to convince her that they were anything other than age. She stretched, taking a virtuous pleasure in her ability to do so while keeping her long body contained within her allocated column of vertical space. When she’d suggested visiting, he’d agreed enthusiastically, and she’d ridden that wave of bravery and euphoria all the way to the flight booking page. She was proud of herself for suggesting it, proud of her own vulnerability in a context where she’d usually tried hard to preserve the illusion of playing it cool, and she was simultaneously humiliated at how readily she’d accepted his enthusiasm at face value, how diligently she’d avoided wondering how much of it was just pandemic-mediated loneliness directing itself in the easiest possible direction. What she wanted from the weekend was to feel that she wasn’t just a convenient outlet for social and sexual drives left in the ether over the last few years of solitude.

The problem, or a problem, with air travel was the absolute necessity of demonstrating competence at the basic tasks of flying. She’d followed the signs at the airport (which was always and ever under construction, littered with brightly-colored temporary signage helpfully pointing the way to nowhere), she’d passed efficiently thru security with comradely nods for the staff, who were just doing their jobs and weren’t responsible for the indignities of standing in socks waiting for someone to scrutinize the contents of her bag of toiletries. She’d moved aside sympathetically for the elderly, belligerently confused couple who were being escorted thru the security checkpoint by a uniformed airport employee. It was easy to feel confident at airports, especially since she was the type of person who always read the signs and therefore almost always knew what to do next.

What she wanted from the weekend was to know what to do next.

Not that there was anything to do. Or any “next,” really. They’d never lived in the same part of the country and it wasn’t likely that they ever would, and when she’d missed him during those young adult years she’d always assumed their real connection would come when they were older, and here they were, years ahead of schedule, when her calculations had suggested they’d both need to be at least fifty before they’d figure out how to relate without the clear cool glass of indifference between them. Here they were at forty-one and she’d been right, it had taken some time for her to find out how to stop concealing her desires and maybe it had taken some time for him too. What she wanted from the weekend was to show herself, to show her desires, but obviously without violating the boundaries of her allocated column of vertical space, that went without saying.

The problem, or a problem, with air travel was that it demanded a degree of mastery over the body’s natural urges and rhythms matched only in things she had read about monks, with their tiny cells and their silence, the first class passengers being naturally exempt from this asceticism.

She was an old hand at this and knew the key was to cultivate ignorance of her body’s escalating desires – to fidget, to shift in her seat looking for a comfortable position, to use the restroom, to give in to a basic bodily shout for movement. Once acknowledged, these desires had a way of insinuating themselves into the brain until there was no choice but to turn to her neighbors and ask them politely to move into the aisle so she could get past them and walk to the back of the plane, the walk itself humiliating as she wove between its splayed knees and shoulders.

But these sorts of desires posed no real problem for her, she was an old hand at flying. The weekend, the weekend, the weekend. What she wanted from the weekend was for it to shift the ground of their relationship just a little, tectonically, gently enough not to be perceptible by any of the wildlife who inhabited its wide plains, but just enough to be detected by her own specially-designed instruments which she’d spend decades refining, their purposes adapted to a dozen other land masses but after all, still originally honed on this very continent. Sometimes these urges, to touch, to move closer, the primal howl for connection, could be tricky, insinuating themselves into perfectly sensible adult emotional transactions, but she was an old hand at this.

II.

The problem, or a problem, with air travel was that it so often involved a return flight, a retracing of the original invisible path. She liked to believe she was flying back over precisely the same cities, the same checkerboard farms, although the truth was she barely even believed the plane was pointed in the opposite direction; she often felt that it was in fact flying backward. She hated the return flight because it seemed precisely designed to undo every thought she’d had on the first original forward-facing flight, to force her to retrace her own ideas until she inevitably arrived back at her point of origin mentally as well as geographically. As her hometown grew closer and closer in the rearview, she slumped in her seat, almost incapable of keeping herself upright inside her own designated space. Not that she wanted any accidental contact with her seatmate, whose nondescript appearance she hadn’t noted, but her body seemed numb, unable to marshal its resources enough to move, to demand movement, to wish for movement.

She’d rushed things coming out to visit this weekend, she saw that now. After all, they weren’t even fifty yet and her desires were too much, much too much at this early stage. She could feel in her body a kind of terrible revulsion building at the thought that she’d slept in his bed for three nights, at least one night too many, she saw that now.

Three nights listening to his heavy breathing, the constant soundtrack to the strange dreams she’d had every night, aware against her will of the ominous pauses in his breathing, awake all night to the possibility that it might fail to resume and she might be called upon to nudge his shoulder, at just the place on the shoulder that’s reserved for a wife to nudge her husband if his middle-aged sleep apnea is keeping her awake at night, and she didn’t want to nudge him there, so what would she do if he really did stop breathing?

It would have been ideal, though unfeasible, for her to have rented a car (at hideous pandemic rates linked through some sort of economic chaos-theory logic to computer parts shortages in China) and driven back home, she saw that now. Even at hideous expense, she would at least have been facing forward, progressing forward through cities and farms that would have seemed different even if they were precisely the same ones she’d flown over a few days before. Driving, she was always able to think more clearly, without the insistent awareness that the flight was almost over, an awareness she had from the moment of takeoff no matter how long the flight was, it was already almost over once you were in the air.

Driving, she might have had time to organize her memories of the weekend without having to constantly review the position of her body to make sure it wasn’t making uninvited intrusions on her neighbor, who she suspected was already annoyed with her for being so listless, so inattentive to their well-being and personal space. The problem, or a problem, with air travel was that it demanded constant attention to the personal space of your neighbors coupled with a studious lack of interest in their doings, which was not always an easy trick to pull off.

The weekend, she would have thought if she’d been alone in a car, facing forward, was too much too soon, and she wondered if there would be another try, years down the road. She was concerned that even if they tried, the visceral details of the weekend would simply make it impossible. After all, how could you desire someone who breathed like that, all night just breathing and breathing, then stopping for just long enough to invite that spousal prod? Or with someone who didn’t shower every day, forgot to brush his teeth, kept expired eggs and ancient takeout containers in his refrigerator? If she were another kind of woman, she would have thought from inside her peaceful, air conditioned forward-facing rental car, she might have taken all of it as signs of a person in dire need of domesticity, of a partner whose competence included such things as pantry staples and wifely elbows, but while her own competence did actually extend to these areas, she felt repulsed by the neediness of the empty tube of toothpaste on the bathroom counter, the peanut butter jar with a bedraggled piece of plastic wrap in place of its long-misplaced lid.

III.

The timing of the weekend had been a problem since the very beginning, she saw that now. Sandwiched between a work event and the kids’ spring break, it had been scheduled on a wave of momentum and anxiety, with no more than a quick glance at her cycle tracking app to ensure she wasn’t setting them both up for a weekend of “no, it’s fine, we’ll just put a towel down.” Towels were all very well for people in established relationships, who had the luxury of time and repetition, so that any individual instance was a drop in the sea of intimacy; they were no good for anything new, or fraught, or fragile.  No red color coding in the app, and she went ahead and booked the flights, but she hadn’t made a plan for the green days, and now it seemed like maybe the green days had made a plan for her instead.

The problem, or a problem, with pregnancy tests was that they had an extremely odd effect on time. It was too soon to take one, but not too soon to worry about the conspicuous absence of the red days in the app, and certainly not too soon to start running scenarios. In fact, with the right mindset, a person could easily take that time to sift through their emotions and make spreadsheets to help arrive at a rational decision about what to do if, and then they could do that all over again and get to different conclusions, really as many times as they wanted to during the too-soon time.

The weekend still fresh in her mind, she could easily create a mental overlay of diapers, bottles and other detritus of early parenthood in his apartment, mingling with its native ecosystem, which was one largely organized around books: books filling the shelves and overflowing without hesitation into stacks on the floor, books which required a certain amount of giving away just to keep the population in check. She wasn’t inflexible in her thinking: she could also picture him living on the lower level of her house in the basement suite, not that he’d ever move away from his east-coast professional mecca to flyover country, no matter how pretty it was. She could even picture sending a bilingual black-haired teenager to Europe to visit his father over every summer once he inevitably moved back to be near his family.

In her twenties, she could have articulated any number of elaborate fantasies of accidental pregnancy, that indisputable anchor, that protoplanet that had the power to capture all sorts of celestial bystanders. In her forties she understood the catastrophic gravity of the situation better. Children (she had two of them and she adored them) were charming black holes, effortlessly attracting love, energy, time to themselves. They re-wove reality around themselves, and they never, ever stopped.

The weekend hadn’t been so bad, it had just been too long, she saw that now. Too long too soon, but surely it could be different. Taking care of a partner (pantry staples wifely nudges) was her idea of hell but taking care of a child, that she knew she could do. She’d asked him once or twice over the years whether he’d thought of having kids, of course. His answers hadn’t been answers, more deflections and deference to the wishes of hypothetical partners. Surely, though, he wouldn’t be immune to the pull, the same one that she could feel even now under her breastbone, drawing her forward into the future like an over-eager dance partner.

Oh god; hope was a painful hook. The hormones that couldn’t exist yet, she knew that, were rushing to fill every nook and cranny of her mind; she could feel them, in real time, dissolving her better judgment. Things would be different, they sang, things would be different when he fell in love with his child, when he fell into a love that outshone romance like the sun outshines a flashlight. Things would be different; *he* would be different, she knew that because she knew how it had changed her. She’d known him for almost twenty-one years, and to tell the truth she’d daydreamed about this exact set of circumstances almost that long; long before she’d wanted any actual children she’d wanted his child, she may as well admit that now.

Things would be different because she could make them different; she knew how to raise a child together, that was one thing she knew at least. Co-parenting wasn’t romance; it was too big for that and tended to push romance out through the cracks as it constructed itself. But after twenty-one years of feeling off balance and graceless where he was concerned, here was a space where she felt confident, like she knew what to do next. She would know what to do next.

The problem, or a problem, with pregnancy tests is that eventually even the most dedicated scenario-runner has to stop running scenarios and pee on the goddamned stick. Afterward she walked resolutely into her bedroom, away from the test and its irritating digital interface. Those were the days, back when they at least gave you that little white window to scrutinize, seeing imaginary lines that gradually turned real, or not. If she liked smoking, she’d have lit a cigarette while she waited.

A beep sounded from the bathroom. With a nonchalant shrug, she rose from her bed; she shook off her anxieties and also that bitch Hope (blossoming in her chest like a mushroom cloud). Under duress you went back to basics so here she was, about to read the sign that would tell her where to go next; calm, efficient, competent to the last.

^{Image by Dave Akshar on Pexels}