Айзек Марион - The Living

I hurtle through town at unsafe speeds, taxing the limits of the old car’s engine, and I honk as we blow past our former neighbor’s new downtown apartment. B— Ben —waves to us from the front steps. It looks like he’s going for a walk.

I quit the stunt driving with a satisfied sigh as we cruise onto the freeway. I try not to notice the heavy clouds building overhead. Is the weather going to ruin my little plan? No. Post has been dry for months. I tell myself to stop worrying. Stop giving bad suggestions to the universe.

“Um, R?” Julie says when I drive past our exit. “Where are…”

“I’m taking you out.” I flash her what I hope is a charming grin. “Dinner date.”

She arches her eyebrows with an Oh really? smile and says no more.

Halfway to our destination, it happens. For the first time all autumn, rain falls on Post. The clouds burst like water balloons, dumping torrents into the convertible’s open cab. Julie stubbornly holds her smile, which becomes a parody as her hair droops over her eyes.

“Really need to fix that canopy…” I mumble.

“Yep,” Julie says, trying not to laugh.

She doesn’t ask any questions as I pull into Oran Airport. I’m sure our destination was no surprise, but I hope there are still a few details she hasn’t guessed.

I don’t go to the arrivals gate. There is nothing to see in the terminal. There are no pale crowds shuffling through its halls, waiting for some long-canceled flight. Those people have changed their itineraries and gone on to new destinations, and the airport is empty again.

I take a service road onto the airfield. The rain has turned months of dust into a slick layer of mud and I’m tempted to do some donuts as the first half of my surprise comes into view, but I don’t want to interrupt Julie’s reaction.

“The wings are on!” she says. “Are they…is it finished ?”

“Almost. They’re saying one more week.”

Out on the runway, surrounded by scaffolds and tool carts, air compressors and solar panels, David Boeing is almost healed. The truck that hauled it here waits off to the side, its Axiom logo exed out with spray-paint, but the crew of technicians has gone home for the day. Julie and I have the place to ourselves.

Before I’ve quite finished parking she hops out and runs a circle around the plane, wiping rain out of her eyes so she can examine the repairs. Sheets of aluminum taken from other planes form a multi-colored patchwork on the fuselage, and the new engine doesn’t quite match the others.

“They said it’ll take some special care,” I tell Julie, “but it’ll fly. So if you want to start working on that pilot license…”

Julie grins at me through gaps in her wet hair. Then she whirls around and runs up the stairs to the entrance. Hoisting my bag over my shoulder, I follow her into the warm, dry shelter of the cabin.

I find her sitting in first class, waiting expectantly. I set my bag on a chair and begin to lay out our picnic. Two bottles of beer. Two paper takeout cartons. Two sets of chopsticks.

Julie sniffs. Her eyes widen. “Is that…?” She hops down onto the floor and rips open her carton. A little puff of steam rises from a pile of fresh pad thai. “ Where ?” she says, looking at me like I’ve performed a miracle.

“From a restaurant. We have restaurants now.”

She lunges forward and kisses me, not a peck this time but something deep and searching, and for a moment I think she might tear my clothes off right here and now. Then she pulls back and takes a deep breath. “Okay,” she says, giving me a wryly demure smile. “Shall we eat?”

The noodles are tangy and sweet. The tofu is dense and spicy. I savor the feeling of my face flushing, sweating, every cell in my body limber and alive.

We eat in silence. My record player is gone, but in lieu of music we have the cockpit radio scanning the long range bands. All static so far, but it’s a soft, pleasant static, like ocean waves.

Julie sucks down her last noodle and takes a sip of beer. “I see you taking a lot of pictures lately,” she says. “Think photography might be your job or whatever? Your ‘contribution’?”

I shrug.

“Tomsen’s starting a video feed for the Almanac. Maybe you could be, like…a photojournalist.”

“I like taking pictures,” I say, staring into the mouth of my beer, which I haven’t tasted yet, “but I don’t think that’s it.”

“Any other ideas?”

I hesitate a moment, then reach into my bag and toss her my notebook. I take a long pull off the beer as she flips through the pages. When she looks up, there’s a strange mixture of emotions on her face.

“Writing?” she says. “You want to be a writer?”

Another drink. “Maybe.”

“Is that because…” She pauses, as if unsure how to say it and also whether she should say it, but she says it. “Is that because Perry wanted to?”

I shake my head. “Perry taught me a lot. He let me borrow his past until I could find my own.” I nod toward the notebook. “But that’s all me.”

She searches my face for a moment. Then she flips back to the first page and starts to read.

My cheeks flush again, this time not from the spice, and I start talking just to fill the silence. “I’ve always been better at the world in my head but I think that’s okay because we need stories, right? Dreams are how we process reality, right? Even evolution, the ultimate pragmatist, thought we needed dreams for something, so I just think if—”

Julie holds up a hand, still looking at the notebook, and I finally shut up.

“‘I was dead, but it wasn’t so bad,’” she reads. “‘I’d learned to live with it.’”

I tip the bottle back again, but somehow it’s empty. Is there a leak?

“R,” she says, looking up from the page. “You’re writing a memoir?”

I shrug, tossing aside the bottle like it’s betrayed me.

A smile spreads across her face. “Am I in it?”

“You’re the main character.”

She looks down as if intending to read the whole thing right here. I snatch it out of her hands.

“Fine, fine,” she says. “I’ll wait till it’s finished. Although…” She cocks her head. “…when will that be? How do you finish your life story while it’s still in progress?”

“This is part one.” I tuck the notebook into my bag. “Give me a few more decades for the rest.”

The roar of the rain on the roof suddenly stops, leaving only the radio static. We both get up and peek through the windows. The world outside has been scrubbed clean. The mud is gone from the runways; dust and grime rolls off the plane’s wings in brown rivulets, leaving bright white behind. All throughout the airport, dry grass reaches through cracks in the concrete, and I imagine it drinking up the rain, waking its sleeping cells, beginning to flush with green.

Behind me, in the cockpit, a voice cuts through the static.

Halló? Þetta er Griðarstaðsborg, Ísland, með okkar árlega kall til Ameríku. Er einhver á lífi?

Julie stares at me. “Is that…?”

I’m not sure what it is, but I smile as she bolts for the cockpit.

“Hello?” she says into the receiver. “Hello—halló, um…Ensku? Tala ensku?”

I remain at the window, content to listen as Julie reaches across the globe and greets whoever lives there. The exhausted rainclouds are beginning to disperse, gliding aside like vast curtains, and I watch a single patch of light form near the horizon. I hear a melody in my mind, incredibly distant, like I’m hearing it through a wall between worlds.

The clouds are lifting…the window’s open…time to grow a pair of wings.

Where have I heard this song? Whose voice is that singing it to me? I close my eyes to remember, and my head floods with pictures. Pages. Lives that aren’t mine and lives that aren’t yet anyone’s—lives still waiting to be lived. I’ve spent a lot of time in the past, but I have rarely looked at the future. I look at it now. It towers above me, its ceiling so remote that I’m not sure it has one. Just a light that grows brighter the farther away it gets, shining from distant books too beautiful to understand.