Амброз Бирс - Flight or Fright - 17 Turbulent Tales

In the harsh new light he opened the door to the lavatory, half expecting to find a magically immense room in which the several hundred people who boarded this flight were waiting with pointy party hats and confetti. But it was empty, shockingly white, and smelled of shit and spearmint. Transparent blisters of standing water adorned the sink’s metal basin.

He charged back up coach, through business class, and found himself at the cockpit door, which had a thick, reinforced look. “Hardened,” was the technical term, he believed. How to proceed was unclear. Any display of forcefulness so close to the pilots seemed to John both unwise and potentially unlawful. So he knocked. When no one answered he attempted to open it. Locked. He knocked again. He noticed a small, knee-level cabinet. Inside were four yellow life jackets and some kind of heavy steel air compressor. He looked at the fore’s exit door, another glacial immensity he was not sure he could figure out how to open if he tried. But why would he want to? That he was already considering this a possible exit did not, he realized, bode particularly well.

He was sweating now. His body, as though having at last accepted, analyzed, and rejected the information his mind had sent forth, began some pointless counterattack. From his stomach, the staging area, his body spit his most recent meal into his intestinal coils. He stood there, clenched, listening to his heart pump, his lungs fill and empty. The curtain hanging between voluntary and involuntary function had been torn from its runners. His nervous system seemed a single concentration lapse from going off-line.

He pounded on the cockpit door, shouting that something had happened, that he needed help. When, finally, he stopped, his forehead came to rest against the door’s hardened outer shell. His breath was as sour and microbial as a Petri dish. He felt weak, white-bellied, and exposed. He then heard something on the door’s other side and jumped back. Slowly, he closed back in, fitting his ear within the cup his hand formed against the cold metal. On the other side of the door, in the cockpit of a plane with no passengers, someone was weeping.

He had been advised not to travel outside the United States by his lawyer, his sympathetic university colleagues (he had more than most would have guessed—John was nothing if not the soul of faculty-meeting affability), and those few from Justice to whom he still spoke. But when an invitation to speak at a conference (“International Law and the Future of American-European Relations”) in Tallinn, Estonia, was first extended six months ago, John did what he always did: he talked to his wife.

One of the things he appreciated most about leaving government service was that he could, once again, talk to his wife about work. Anyone who lived within his mind to the degree that John did asked for nothing more perfect than a companion able to step inside that mind when invited and leave before asking was necessary. For the last two years she had been his confidante, sentinel, nurse, and ballast. It was, nevertheless, one of his marriage’s longer, more difficult nights when a number of his so-called torture memos were leaked, and then, without any warning to him, declassified and disavowed. His wife was not the only person with whom he had proved able to clarify his intentions in writing the memos. Any journalist who took the time to see John invariably came away admitting that the purported werewolf seemed a decent enough sort.

After telling his wife about the conference invitation, he admitted, “My first thought was to say no. But I think I may want to go.”

Two years ago, a complaint accusing John of war crimes had been filed in a German court; the gears of this particular justice had since scarcely turned. Another suit was filed six months ago, in a California court, by a convicted American terrorist and his mother, who claimed John’s memos had led to his maltreatment while in U.S. custody. John did not dispute—though of course could not admit—that the wretch had been poorly treated in custody, but drawing the line back to him evidenced a kind of naive legal creationism. While John’s travel was by no means formally restricted, the thought of leaving American airspace filled him with unfamiliar apprehension. This shocked him. It also emboldened him.

“Don’t route your flight through Germany,” his wife said. “Or France. Or Spain. I’d avoid Italy, too, for that matter.”

She thought he was joking about wanting to go, he realized, and he waited a moment before telling her what he liked about Estonia, a young country with memories of actual oppression. He had always been interested in the nations of the former Soviet bloc and post-communist countries in general. (His parents’ flight from Korean Communism was, after all, the only reason he was an American.) He did not think he had any cause to fear Estonia, which was an official American ally in the war. Was his wife aware that there were only a million Estonians in the world? Maybe it was a Korean thing, but he felt strange kinship with small, frequently invaded, routinely pushed-around nations. He admired, he said somewhat grandly, their parochial ambitions. He was now shamelessly appealing to his wife’s own complicated feelings concerning her Vietnamese heritage.

She asked how he could be certain it was not simply a trap to publicly humiliate him. To that he already had something of an answer. The event’s organizers had promised, unprompted, that no topics would be discussed beyond John’s willingness to discuss them. They were aware of the lawsuits and promised him full escape-pod capability during any line of questioning. (“Escape pod.” His words, not theirs. Like any nerd who grew up in the 1970s, John was always good for a Star Wars reference.) The U.S. embassy, moreover, was “aware of” John’s invitation. (“Aware of.” Their words, not his. A middling embassy like Estonia’s was no doubt heavily staffed with Administration flunkies and professional vacationists. Given that John was the only former member of the Administration who insisted on talking about the decisions he had made while part of it, he was as popular among them as a leper bell.)

“But you’ll talk about it all anyway,” she said, “won’t you?” John often reduced his lawyer to similar frustration. He was not afraid to defend himself, provided his interlocutor was not obviously carrying a torch and kindling. After John had granted an interview to Esquire his lawyer did not speak to him for a week. Then his lawyer read the not entirely unflattering profile that resulted. “You’re a smooth one, Counsel,” he told John.

John smiled at his wife. Of course he would talk about it all. He knew what he could and could not say. He was a lawyer.

When he told the event’s organizers he would be able to come, they expressed as much surprise as excitement. He would be the only American, they said, and as such an invaluable part of the discussion. It was agreed he would speak alone, at the close of the conference, for an hour, and then answer questions, some of which, they warned, might be hostile. It all sounded fine, John emailed back. He had faced more bloodthirsty rooms than he imagined Estonia could muster. Before agreeing, he checked in with the embassy in Tallinn. They acknowledged the conference and wished him a successful trip. The last he would hear from them, he suspected.

Six months later, he spent two hours laid over in Helsinki’s airport. When two Finnish security guards stopped near John’s exit to chat, he was not sure why he felt so nervous. It was not as if Interpol had issued a warrant for his arrest. But what man could truly relax knowing that courts on two continents entertained the possibility he had committed crimes against humanity? He supposed he was brave for being here. No, actually. This thought disgusted him. He was a teacher and a lawyer, in that order. He did not recall the last time he raised his voice. He did not recall once, in his four decades, having intentionally hurt anyone. The Finnish guards walked away.