Manuel Gonzales - The Miniature Wife - and Other Stories

When we were still talking — the other passengers and I — the woman who sat next to me and who had once asked that I store some of her bags beneath my seat told me, breathlessly and as she sat down, officially the last person to board the plane and take her seat, how she had nearly missed the flight and how she had had to beg and argue and plead with the gate attendants to let her on board. I explained to them, she told me, how the shuttle had had a flat and how someone was supposed to have called ahead to tell someone about the situation, and that we had somehow convinced the first tow-truck driver to squeeze us into his cab and drive us to the airport so that we could all make our flights on time, but by then, with rush hour traffic, and even with the tow truck flashing its yellow lights, it took us over an hour to move through the accidents and the stalled cars, and by the time we arrived at the entrance to the airport, I only had fifteen minutes to get my baggage checked and run to my gate, and after all of that, do you believe that they almost didn’t let me on the plane? How did you convince them? I invariably asked, to which she replied, Why, honey, with my feminine charm. It was an amazing story the way she told it, embellished and repeated often to the others around her as we taxied down the runway, and in those first few minutes in the air before the Pilot came out of the cockpit and hijacked us all, and then, much later, she began repeating the story again, though lamentably and with less energy, as if she were reciting the Act of Contrition; and with each successive dirge, more and more details of the story were removed until finally, late one night a month or so into our circling, she turned her head to me and confessed that in fact there was no flat tire, no tow-truck driver, no real traffic even, but that she had overslept, and that’s why she had almost missed her flight. If only I had slept ten minutes longer, she said, and then she turned her head to face straight again, and, while I’m sure she must have said something else between then and the time she passed away, I cannot remember what else that might have been. Now, however, I repeat her story to myself, having adopted it as my own, except that sometimes the tow-truck driver refuses to carry us in his cab and we are forced to hail down a woman driving with her baby in a station wagon, and she’s the one who brings us to the airport on time, and sometimes I will catch myself thinking, If only she hadn’t picked us up, and despite the fact that the story, which is not even mine, has never been true, I cannot help but feel a keen disappointment in the fact that such an insignificant event has led me to this end.

III.

When the Pilot died, it came to light that he in fact did have a copilot. The pregnant woman’s son, it turned out, had been spending more and more time in the Pilot’s cabin, learning the technique of flying, learning the secrets of our perpetual oil. At first, we were relieved. The Pilot was gone, we could finally land, and the boy, now a young man, would certainly land the plane, just as his mother had asked him to. But, of course, why should he? In a way, it made more sense to us — perhaps not to the boy’s mother — that we continued to circle Dallas even after the Pilot’s death. In all of our time circling with the Pilot, we never learned, were never told why we could not land, why we had been hijacked. Now that the boy was in charge, though, what else should he have done? What other world did he know but this one inside the plane? Would he so easily give up its comforts, its familiarity?

Most of us had some memory of what it was like to stand straight, to walk on an object that does not so noticeably move, to breathe air that has not been cycled and recycled a hundred thousand times, and even we were a little afraid of what our lives would become if we were to finally land on solid ground. The prospect of seeing a building up close and from below must have been a devastating and frightening one for the boy. Despite his mother’s weeping and crumpled body outside the Pilot’s door, he did not alter the Pilot’s original course, not even to change the direction of our circle.

Shortly after the Pilot hijacked the plane, he had us pose for pictures taken with a Polaroid camera. As with everything else, he did not explain why he wanted these pictures. The flight attendants had us stand in front of the lavatory between first class and coach, and after the picture was taken and had developed, they let each of us look at our photograph before placing it in a box with the rest of them that was eventually handed over to the Pilot.

The Copilot — he had a name, but since the Pilot’s death, he refused to answer to anything but Copilot — found these photographs and decided to take another series of them, and we lined up again and posed. Once these had developed, the Copilot had his mother give everyone the original photograph and the new photograph. A sizable pile of old pictures with no matching new ones remained in the box, and these, we decided, should be placed in the now empty seats, but once this had been done, we changed our minds and took them all back up and placed them back in the box and returned the box to the cockpit.

I had begun to put on some weight before my trip, and I remember feeling self-conscious about the way my pants had begun to fit. There is a difference of maybe thirty pounds between the first man pictured and the second man pictured. Still, the thinness looks no better on me than the extra weight did. Whereas my clothes once seemed uncomfortably small, they look, in the more recent photograph, ridiculously large. Furthermore, along with the weight, my face has lost whatever charm it once had. Oddly, and this seems to be the case with nearly everyone else’s pictures, too, I am smiling in both.

IV.

I often find myself lost in thought, trying to imagine the paths of our lives after we have landed. In this I am, I believe, alone.

Suppose the Copilot falls ill and we are forced into an emergency landing, or simply, as he matures, he experiences an epiphany, a change of heart, a desire to do something more with his life. Whatever the reason, some small part of me would not be terribly surprised if one day the Copilot were to step out of his cabin and ask, nonchalantly, “Does anyone know how to put us down?” I wonder, then, which we will choose: to rebuild our former lives or begin them anew. Is twenty years long enough to wipe away bad marriages, poor career choices, too many long hours spent following someone else’s dreams? How many of us will return to our old homes, rented out to new tenants or boarded up or sold, settle ourselves back into old routines now occupied by new people?

Some of us have already made our choices. The former accountant practices sleight of hand tricks for hours on end. He has told me, while pulling quarters out of my ear, while filling and emptying the overhead bins with the wave of a blanket, that he plans to change his name, buy a few costumes, and take up the birthday party racket, or aim for the big time, the comedy club circuit. “Carpe diem,” he told me.

For others, the choice seems to have been made for us. My wife has remarried. It is likely that by now my parents have both died. The friendships I enjoyed have surely unkindled themselves after twenty years. I will step out of this plane and onto the tarmac with no human connection but to the people on board with me, most of whom I have not spoken to in months. I am afraid that I will, if I’m not careful, seek out a life that most closely resembles the one I have for twenty years been living. Perhaps when we land, I will buy a bus ticket and ride the Crosstown 404 as it loops through its never-ending circuit. Or I might rent or buy a car and drive to Belt Line Road and continue to circle the city in that way. It would be good to devise a plan to prevent this sort of life taking hold, but no such plan comes readily to mind. In my imagination, then, I often wind up on the side of the road, kicked off the bus by the driver or having run out of gasoline, forced then to continue my course on foot. These thoughts bring me little comfort, which explains, perhaps, why the others have given up such fruitless speculation and why all plans of overpowering our hijacker and taking control of the situation were long ago abandoned.