Manuel Gonzales - The Miniature Wife - and Other Stories

She told me about my father, his heart attack. She told me that she had gone to my wife’s second wedding, and that it was a nice, small affair. She asked me about what we had been eating, and, so she wouldn’t worry, I did not mention the weight I had lost, or the flavorless liquid the Pilot had us drink. She asked if I had met anyone on the plane, a nice woman, perhaps, someone, anyone to keep me from feeling lonely. So she wouldn’t worry, I told her about the pregnant woman, who had not been pregnant now for quite some time, but I was embarrassed talking about it on the phone since I knew that she could hear me saying these things to my mother even though both of us knew nothing had ever happened between the two of us except for one night, during a heavy storm, when the cabin lights blew out and she grabbed my hand out of fright. I tried talking to her once or twice after that night, but her son, who had grown into a rather big boy at seven years old, locked me in the bathroom when his mother wasn’t looking and threatened to keep me locked in there unless I promised to leave his mother alone.

After a while, a second woman’s voice came on the line and informed my mother and me that the call would end soon and that the phones would be disconnected and shut off once we hung up. We said our good-byes. I told her to tell my wife hello. Then we hung up.

Early on, I figured that what I would miss most from my former life, assuming that we would not make it through the tragedy alive, would be my wife: the presence of her, the sound of her voice, the feel of her pressed next to me at night in our bed, her small soft hand enveloped by my own. But I have found that, not being dead, not even being seriously injured, not being lost or, technically, alone, but instead finding myself in this plane, what I miss most are those basic qualities of life — standing up, walking around, sleeping lying flat, sex — and what I miss above all is food.

We ran out of the ham and cheese sandwiches within six weeks, despite the rationing, and the pretzels were eaten within the next month after that. At first, we were disappointed that we had no more food, until it dawned on us that, unless the Pilot wanted to starve himself or, even if he had been hoarding his own supplies in the cockpit, unless he wanted to circle Dallas with a plane full of the starved and emaciated and, eventually, dead, he would have to finally land.

A full two days passed after the last bag of pretzels had been emptied before the Pilot finally came out of his cockpit. Expecting him to admit defeat, or to inform us of his plans to land in some remote island in the Pacific or simply to crash us into the earth (by then, anything would have been preferable to the constant sight of the city below us), we waited patiently for him to speak. He frowned and looked down at his feet. “As you are probably all now aware, we have run out of food, which means we must now draw straws to see who of us will be the first to be eaten.” He paused as we each looked at our neighbor, and perhaps if he had actually made us try to eat one another, we would have then risen up, wrested control of the plane from him, found a way to land, ended the ordeal. But before we could do or say anything, he smiled broadly at us and laughed, saying, “No, no, no. I’m just joking.” He then proceeded to walk down the aisle, pulling out a bag he’d hidden behind his back, and began to hand out small vials of a clear liquid to each passenger as he passed. With each vial handed out, he would repeat, “Two drops should do. No more than two drops. Don’t want to overdo it. Two drops should do just fine.” Once he was finished, he walked to the front of the plane again, turned to us, and said, “Bon appétit,” and then stepped back into his cockpit, the door closing solidly behind him.

As we ran low on drops, the Pilot would bring us new vials.

I’m not sure how they work or what sustenance they provide. While I am still hungry after my two drops, while I still have an insatiable appetite and the desire for some unnameable flavor in my mouth (the drops at first had a mild grassy taste to them, but are now as good as flavorless, as I can’t taste anything at all, or else I seem to have forgotten almost entirely what anything might taste like) and I have lost weight and will probably continue to lose weight, I have not starved. As far as I know, no one who has taken the drops has.

The Pilot would come out of his cabin two or three times a day. As he grew older and as his blond hair turned, in places, white, I began to wonder how he felt in the mornings when he woke up, if he felt as old and tired as I sometimes felt.

I assumed he slept. He locked the cabin door at night, so none of us knew for sure. I asked him once if he slept and he didn’t answer me, and then I asked him, if he did sleep, who flew the plane. He laughed and patted his belly and said, “My copilot.” When I asked him, recently, if his copilot would also be the one to fly the plane once he has died, he did not respond, pretending not to have heard my question.

It is surprising to me how quickly news of the hijacking spread. I called my wife within the hour of being told we had been hijacked, and she already knew. The people of Dallas organized a vigil that very night. We could see the huddled bunch of them with their candles standing on the tarmac of the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. Someone — a gentleman from the rear of the plane — said, “Them standing there, we couldn’t land even if we wanted to.” In the morning, the same group of people (or perhaps a new group) stood in approximately the same formation, this time holding white posters with black letters on them that spelled out something too small for us to read.

For a while, I liked to think of my wife there among them, holding a candle or a piece of the message, but, in truth, my wife does not like crowds, and it’s more likely that she was not.

Within a week, regardless of my wife’s involvement or lack thereof, the vigils had stopped, the news reports, I’m almost certain, had stopped as well, and we had become a fixture of the Dallas skyline, no different or more exciting than the neon Mobile Pegasus.

II.

I often find myself considering the man my wife married, by which I usually mean myself, a thought that then returns me to the fact that she has since remarried, and so I am forced to think of the two of us, her husband and I, side by side. This despite the fact that I have never seen him, which leads me, more often than not, to picture myself side by side my other self so that I might consider how the two of us have failed and how we continue to fail as husbands. I have a cataloged list in my head; it grows by the day, and it changes nearly constantly as faults are moved around, given more or less priority, my dirty underwear left on the bathroom floor moved down a rung by the peanut-butter-encrusted knife left for a week in the backseat of my car. When I get into this mood of rearranging faults — real and imagined — I begin to wonder, too, what the other passengers, those who are left, are thinking. We are not friends, any of us. Of course, we were all friends at first, or, at the very least, friendly with those people to our left or our right or across the aisle, as people on a plane tend to be, in that manner of searching for common ground in a book being read, a destination being reached, a vacation being taken. With the underlying sense that these friendships would last no longer than the few hours between Dallas and Chicago, we opened ourselves up to our neighbors. These relationships were made stronger once the plane was hijacked, as we felt bonded to one another by a shared sense of tragedy and uncertainty. Then, as time passed, as we continued to circle, as we realized just how long we might have to share the same space with one another, we — I am projecting now — began to feel crowded, as if there wasn’t enough room, and slowly we gathered ourselves inward, pulling knees into our chests, feet onto the seats, curling our arms around our shins, and placing our heads down or, if we could stomach the sight, pressing our faces away from our neighbors and against the windows. Now the plane is still and quiet, and we have been moving with such regularity for so long that I have this sense of perfect unmovement, which creeps into the pit of my stomach and produces there a soft fluttering of wings and a welling anxiety, as if I had forgotten to do some minor but personal thing, or as if I were riding a child’s ride at a fair, the dips not enough to be truly belly-rising, but raising, instead, a tingling awareness of gravity, or gravitas, in my arms and shoulders and legs; a feeling that is at once pleasant and upsetting.