Manuel Gonzales - The Miniature Wife - and Other Stories

Only later did we find out, from one of the flight attendants, that he was the real pilot. That he had been flying for ten years. That she had flown with him a number of times. But that no one knew what had happened to the copilot.

At one point, looking out the window at the city below — the streets and the highways and the trees and buildings — I saw a long freight train moving slowly along the tracks that run parallel to Highway 635, and I was reminded of a story I had written in which a man had tried to build a scale model of nineteenth-century America and the trains that crossed it. He lived underground, as did a number of other people in this story, and so had no concept of how large exactly the continent was. Looking out the window at this height made me realize that such a model was now laid out before me, and I understood that I, too, had no concept of how large exactly the continent was. That the scope of my imagination was shown to be so much smaller in scale and weight than the continent that I had been trying to imagine through the eyes of a man who had never seen it before depressed me, and so I closed my window shade for the first time and leaned my head back against the seat and tried to sleep.

Sometimes I will go for weeks, months, even, without looking at myself in the bathroom mirror. I know the bathroom well enough to be able to perform whatever human functions I need to perform with my eyes closed. Then, after a long enough time has passed, I will suddenly open my eyes and stare directly into my own face in the mirror, hoping the sight of age will shock me into feeling some kind of emotion, sadness or anger or humility, but I have decided that anything besides boredom and thirst and a dull, physical ache is beyond the reach of airplane passengers.

I have tried to write other things besides this since the plane was hijacked. The Pilot gave me pen and paper, and I at first expected that he expected me to chronicle the hijacking. I wrote a few pages — descriptions, mainly: the color of the woman’s hair next to me, the stale, cold air of the cabin, etc., etc. — and showed them to him, but then he didn’t want them, said he didn’t have time to read them. “Don’t you know I’m busy?” he said, laughing, but also, or so it seemed, peeved that I had bothered him. I’ve never been comfortable with rejection of this sort, and, for the first year or so, his words kept me from writing anything down at all. Then, slowly, I began to take notes for a story and then notes for a novel and then notes for another novel and another story, but all they have been are notes.

We were given permission to use our cell phones. The Pilot said he didn’t care about signals or about whom we called. Everything he said, he said with a laugh, though none of us could ever tell what he thought was so funny. We called our loved ones. I called my wife. I told her we had been hijacked. She knew, she said, because it was all over the evening news. We said those things we were supposed to say, but I felt that her heart wasn’t in it, that maybe she was distracted by the news story on the television. Maybe my heart wasn’t in it, either. A baby had been crying for some time in the row or two rows behind me. We, my wife and I, didn’t have kids and she wasn’t pregnant and we had only been married for a short while, so I had a hard time feeling as bad for myself as for the old man who was missing his wife’s birthday, who then missed — as time went on — their fortieth anniversary, and then her funeral; or the man whose pregnant wife was on board with us (the one I pushed down by accident), whose unborn child he might never see. But then, they (the old man, the pregnant wife) never appeared to feel too sad about it all, either. Mostly, once I hung up with my wife, I felt worn out by the need to shout so much over the poor reception, and twice our phones hung up by mistake — lost signal, etc. — and each time involved a series of callbacks and messages until we were finally able to reconnect. Looking around the cabin at the other passengers as they also hung up with their loved ones, I had the feeling that they had been worn out, too. No one much used their cell phones after those first few days, and eventually all of the batteries died out, anyway.

My eyes adjusted so completely to looking at the city from high up that when I imagined myself on the ground, walking through the downtown area, or driving from north Dallas to Plano or Grapevine, I could not figure out how I would navigate from such a narrow perspective. How would I know my way around? How would I avoid being run over by a car or hit by a trailer truck?

As the years passed, I learned to pick out details, as if I were a hawk or an owl. I got to where I could see my parents’ house, my wife’s mother’s house, the church where my wife remarried; not just see the general area where they should have been, but see them, in detail. Sometimes I will see a little boy or girl whose ball has bounced into the street run out after it unaware of the teenager speeding around the corner, or some situation like this, and the first couple of times I saw this, I yelled at the child (or dog or blind old man) to watch out, but I soon realized how foolish I sounded, how I startled the other passengers with my yelling, and so I stopped.

A young man in first class — a business executive or some such, I suppose — began a regimen of walking and stretching and worked very hard to convince everyone else on the plane to follow suit.

“This poor excuse for food,” he complained, “will only make us sick and flabby.”

He said, about our muscles, “Use them or lose them, people.”

He would walk down the aisle and pat random bellies, or he would jog down the aisle, bouncing on his toes, his arms up around his face as if he were preparing for a boxing match. A few of the passengers joined him. Calisthenics, jumping jacks, yoga stretches. Most of us, though, sat in our seats and watched him bounce up and down, his face sickly and pale and sweaty. It turned out that he wasn’t eating the food at all, and it was really no surprise, in hindsight, that he was the first to go. After that, the exercise regimens came to an end.

The phone in front of my seat rang once. It was my mother. I do not know how she knew how to contact me on the plane. Other phones rang at other seats, too, and I suppose it is possible that the airline gave these callers our numbers. She sounded the same on the phone as she had when I had last spoken with her, some seven or eight years before, but I knew that she must have looked much older than I remembered, and as we spoke, I closed my eyes and tried to add wrinkles and creases to her face, gray hairs to her scalp, liver spots to the back of the hand that held the phone.