I presumed that he was one of those people who hated being alone. Perhaps if I’d been paying closer attention, or if I’d known what was to come, I’d have detected a glimmer of desperation in his eyes. I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t there, not yet.
We checked into the lounge at a marble counter, where an officious young man took my pass and waved us in, letting us know that they would be announcing when it was time for us to head down to the gate. Jeff found seats by the window, a low table between them, and gestured for me to sit, as if he were my host. The chair was real leather and the table real wood. He offered to grab a few beers. I hadn’t had a drink in eight years but said that I’d be happy to watch him drink. He made for the food area, leaving his bags. Even in the airport’s privileged inner sanctum, I couldn’t look at the unattended bags without imagining they contained contraband, or a bomb. I put it out of my mind. My mantra for air travel has always been: Stop thinking. From the moment one enters the airport, one is subject to a host of procedures and mechanisms designed to get one from point A to point B. Stop thinking and be the cargo.
Jeff strolled up, two beers in hand. He put one in front of me, announcing that he’d found a nonalcoholic brew, and that he wasn’t sure if I drank them, but he thought it might make things feel more ceremonial—that was the word he used—for us to catch up over a couple of beers, alcoholic or not, for old times’ sake. We had never drunk together that I could remember, but I let it go. We clinked bottles and sipped, our eyes turning to the plane traffic outside.
“The miracle of travel,” he said. “Fall asleep someplace, wake up halfway around the world.”
“I can’t sleep on planes,” I said.
“I know a woman,” he said, “friend of a friend, you could say, who is terrified of flying but has to travel to various places every year for family obligations. Only flies private, by the way, this is a very wealthy person. And here’s what she does. An anesthesiologist comes to her house, knocks her out in her own bed, travels with her to the airport, to wherever she’s going, unconscious, and when they arrive at the destination, she’s loaded into whatever bed she’s staying in, whether it’s one of her other homes or a hotel, and he brings her back. She literally goes to sleep in one place and wakes up in another.”
“Someone should do that for us in economy,” I said. “You could fit a lot more people on every flight. Sardine style.”
Jeff sipped his beer.
“You have business in Frankfurt?” he asked, his eyes passing over my scuffed sneakers.
“Berlin,” I said. “My publisher is there.”
I didn’t mention that I was traveling on my own dime, hoping to capitalize on a German magazine’s labeling me a “cult author.” Or that I was also taking a much-needed break from family obligations, carving out a week from carpools and grocery shopping to live the life readers picture writers live full-time.
“I can’t imagine writing a book,” he said.
“Neither can I.”
I’d said it before and meant it every time, but people always took it as an expression of false modesty.
Jeff laughed slightly. His demeanor changed, and I expected him to ask if he should have heard of any of my books. Instead, he asked if I’d ever gone under.
“I had my tonsils out in high school.”
“Did you worry you wouldn’t wake up?”
I shook my head. “Didn’t cross my mind. Though were I to go under now, I wouldn’t be so cavalier.”
“You have kids.”
“Two.”
“Changes everything, doesn’t it?”
He had undergone surgery recently, nothing serious, or not life-threatening at least, but he had ended up terrified that he wouldn’t wake up again. It did happen to people. And though such accidents had become exceedingly rare, he couldn’t help but imagine his going to sleep and never waking up, what it would do to his children—he had two as well—and to his wife. The whole episode had disturbed him greatly.
“Sleep is the cousin of death,” I said.
Outside, a jumbo jet came in for a landing, too high and too fast and too far down the runway, at least to my eyes, and maybe to Jeff’s too, since he watched it as well, but it came down fine, slowed dramatically, and made for the taxiway like any other plane. All the activity outside—the low vehicles buzzing around, the marshalers and wing walkers guiding planes with their orange batons, the food service trucks lifting and loading, the jetways extending, the segmented luggage carts rumbling across the tarmac—all of it vibrated under the gray sky like a Boschean tableau.
While I had been watching, he had been hunting down a thought.
“Coming out of surgery,” he said, “waking up in the recovery room, foggy as hell, I didn’t feel the sense of relief I had expected to feel—that only came later when I saw my family again. I felt like I’d lost a chunk of time. Like sleep, but when you sleep you wake up where you went down. I felt that things had happened to me without my knowledge, which they had, of course, and I was left with the uncanny sense that I wasn’t the same person who had gone under. Time had passed, a part of my body was no longer in me, I had had a square shaved from my leg for some kind of circuit-completing electrode, but I was still I, obviously. Now, this may have been a side effect of the drugs, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d only just arrived in the world, as a replacement for the old me. It wore off, as I said, but it wasn’t a pleasant state.”
“Like a near-death experience?” I asked.
“Funny you should say that,” Jeff said, as if he hadn’t just nudged the conversation in that direction. “I ended up in close proximity to one once. Not long after college, in fact, a year or so later. I was, through no planning or forethought on my part, responsible for saving a man’s life.”
I wondered why he emphasized “no planning or forethought” when that would have been the default.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Let me grab a few more beers first.”
“No, no,” I said. “These are on me.”
“They’re free.”
“Let me get them, then.”
He settled into his chair.
I rose and made my way past a variety of travelers, from business types to trust fund hipsters, many of them speaking foreign languages. They weren’t so different from their counterparts downstairs, other than not looking like they were undergoing an ordeal. I ordered beers from the dour bartender. It was not quite noon. When I returned to our table and handed Jeff a bottle, he raised it for another toast.
“Running into you was serendipitous,” he said. “You were there at the beginning.”
2
“The beginning?” I asked.
“The film class,” he said, “with the Nigerian professor.”
“Ethiopian,” I said.
Jeff looked dubious. “You sure?”
“We watched a Nigerian film, but one hundred percent the prof was from Ethiopia.”
Jeff was silent for a moment.
“All these years,” he said, “I’ve been thinking he was Nigerian.”
“Changes your story completely.”
He caught my smile.
“Okay,” he said, “we were in the film class. You, me, my girlfriend Genevieve, who went by G. You remember G?” he asked.
I didn’t.
“She was unremarkable,” he said. He leaned back like someone who was used to being listened to. “Not that I knew it at the time. Tragically conventional. A film student, the most talented filmmaker in her class by a mile. Top-notch, professional-level work, or so it seemed to me then. But it wasn’t just me. Her professors were always gushing over her stuff, talking about grad school, telling her she had a bright career ahead of her if she was willing to put in the work, and so on. Then, senior year, there’s a thesis film awards ceremony, and the top prize goes to someone else, a guy, which is bad enough, but a guy whose film was a complete mess.”