Rafael Yglesias - Fearless

“You’re right. How did you figure that out?”

This time, hearing only Perlman’s voice, unaccompanied by the clown’s bright red face, Max detected anxiety, not his dead father. “You talk like a shrink.” The pilot had completed the turn. The chime sounded. Max had survived again. He was going to survive everything. He felt he could outlive even the exhausted and defiled earth. Max opened his eyes and noticed Perlman’s shoes were expensive. In fact, his outfit was quite fashionable and costly, although casual. “What kind of shrink works for an airline? You said you consulted?”

“I specialize in posttraumatic stress reactions. I’ve written a book about it. I worked with a TransCon crew that survived a pretty rocky flight—”

“The Hawaii one? The pop-top jet?”

“Pop top?” Perlman’s voice got deep and quiet. His red eyebrows came together above his nose.

“Isn’t that the 727”—Max indicated the cabin of their plane—“this very model plane — whose top came off on a commuter flight?”

“Pop top…?” Perlman repeated Max’s joke to himself in a mumble. “That’s a cruel way of talking about it.” He was almost inaudible, practically speaking to himself.

“What would be a kind way of talking about it?” Max asked. “Excuse me…?” he called forward to the senior flight attendant, a formidable middle-aged woman with a stiff hair-sprayed arc of blond hair and a shiny wide brow. “Could I have another?” he indicated his empty drink cup.

“Would you like a Valium?” Perlman asked, nodding at Max’s drink cup.

“No, a Scotch,” Max said and laughed hard, delighted by his irreverence. He was usually solemn and respectful of authority. But was Perlman authority? The flight attendant acknowledged his request from a distance with a nod. Max lowered his cup and said to Perlman, “Sorry. Dumb joke.”

“You’re doing fine. Don’t apologize. Your wife was amazed that you were willing to fly home.”

Max could imagine her anxious whisper of a voice responding to Perlman, rising to a louder incredulity: “Max is flying back to New York? That’s crazy!” Max thought he had better show some concern for her, lest Perlman think him a barbarian: “How is she?”

“Well, we spoke on the phone for a little while. She sounded all right. Upset that you hadn’t called. Worried about you, of course.”

“My wife is very beautiful,” Max said and remembered her ten years ago, not very different from today, the same weight, skinnier if anything, her hair still a luxuriant brown, her pale skin still smooth, her light brown eyes wide and worried. What had changed was the animation of her features. Her mouth used to be open and laughing, teeth generously exposed, her throat vulnerable. That was how she showed her age: she didn’t laugh; she smiled with sealed lips, polite and without enjoyment. She was tall and desirable, a dancer’s figure holding up at forty as if she were exercising daily and injecting collagen monthly. Although she wasn’t taking collagen, she taught ballet to children and kept herself in shape. She wore little makeup and usually dressed in jeans and plain tops. Even her few and rarely used formal dresses were basic colors and unadorned by complicated fashion. But Max thought her vain, anyway, vainer for her indifference to cosmetics, believing her intention was to emphasize her beauty by showing that it required so little help. “Could you tell from her voice that she’s beautiful?”

Perlman paused before answering. He frowned and stared ahead. After a moment, he swallowed, as if he had at last ingested Max’s meaning. “No. Why do you ask?”

“She has a friendly voice,” Max explained. “But it doesn’t sound like the voice of a beautiful woman. She sounds short and sympathetic and smart and nervous. But she’s actually tall and a little cold, and I’ve come to the conclusion she’s not as smart as she seems. She’s selfish and that holds her back. She can’t see beyond her own point of view. She is nervous, though. Terribly nervous that something will come out of her. Something ugly and irreversible.”

“What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know. And I think maybe I should stop caring.”

“Does she love you?” Perlman was grave. He rattled the ice in his plastic cup, concerned.

“Yes. Very much.” Perlman beamed at this answer. Max smiled back, delighted to have pleased the furry red giant. “That’s the worst part. She thinks I’m great.”

“And why is that bad?”

“Because I’m not who she thinks I am. You know, I already have a therapist.”

“Yes, your wife mentioned. I tried to reach him, in fact.”

“We spent quite a lot of time these past weeks discussing my fear of flying.” The flight attendant arrived with Max’s second Scotch. “He told me I had nothing to worry about.” Max held up the plastic cup, toasting Perlman. “Cheers.”

“Cheers. Are you angry at him for being wrong?”

“No!” Max smiled into Perlman’s serious, evaluating eyes. “That would be neurotic. And I wouldn’t want my shrink to think I’m neurotic.”

“Do you want to talk about the crash?” Perlman tipped his cup all the way to get at an ice cube. It bounced off his upper lip and rolled back to the bottom.

Max saw the DC-10 in sections, in flames on the bleached runway, but the action was stilled, as if photographed for a picture postcard. What had happened to him was inside the pieces, deeper in his memory. He didn’t want to give up the safety of being outside the wreck for the sake of Perlman’s curiosity.

“No,” he told Perlman and turned away. Across the aisle, outside this jet’s windows, the sun had lowered and yet was fierce, unveiled in the cloudless blue sky, its dominance threatened only by the horizon’s rim. Max stared at it until the brilliance forced his lids to shut. The impression danced on the red world of his closed eyes. He thought the innerscape was like his childhood visions of the red planet, Mars. He remembered his thrill at hearing JFK vow that Max’s countrymen would reach the moon before the Russians. Max had immediately wanted more — a mission to Mars — an advance that would take them to other worlds, other peoples. During his college years, in spite of the druggy cynicism about national policy, Max had rejoiced at Apollo’s success and assumed the United States would conquer the solar system within his lifetime. Landing on the moon was still, to his mind, the only achievement of his country worthy of its stature as an Empire. The space shuttle blowing up and the cowardly aftermath were further proof of how second-rate the United States and its leaders had become. The hostility of conservatives and liberals to further space exploration was all that he had to point to — surely anything both sides agreed was a waste had to be worthwhile and noble. Sitting next to the airline’s hired therapist, Max understood something that had bothered him for a decade, that he had known only in a sleepy, evasive way. He was living in a reductive age, a time where any diminishment of person or goal was popular. The astronauts were now considered to be frauds and no one believed racism could be conquered. The two longings of his youth, to live in peace with all the races and ethnics of his city, to see men walk on other worlds, were laughable, even stupid desires in the eyes of the smart and sophisticated and powerful people of his time. It wasn’t the disappointment of designing discount electronics stores that had embittered Max; it was living in a nation without dreams that made reality so hard.

“It was stupid,” Max said at last and his cheeks felt heavy. His eyes watered.

“What was stupid?”

Max rubbed the tears back into his eyes. He drained the plastic cup. The Scotch made him feel empty.